A salutary lesson

At school we had a resident cynic. “One thing I’ll never be is a dentist- imagine looking into people’s mouths all day.” was the least cynical statement I remember him making – he had a point.

His words fell on ears attuned to drills, jaws practised in being at full stretch and a mouth accustomed to a suction device furiously draining away excess mouth fluids. An early entry to boarding-school before good toothbrushing habits were formed, together with cheap sweets, bread and jam and porridge laced with sugar to overcome the lumps had put my teeth in line for the dentist’s door. “You’ve got a number of cavities,” he said.  I heard the echo.

Those years in the dentist’s chair were characterised by pain, an early lesson in suffering the consequences of my actions – or lack thereof.  A dentist may feel sorry for his squirming charge but he cannot feel guilty.  That’s for the account of the parents and child. He did what he could, though: a huge fish tank where shapes and colours of all description glided peacefully met my eyes when I opened the door to the waiting-room.  I stood and watched, the tank a lovely buffer. How wonderful to be a fish and not have teeth.

“How I see myself…  How others see me.” is a well-known meme.  “How I imagine what the dentist was doing…  What was actually happening.” is not. I shall do my best: injection… the needle must have come out of my cheek by now; the gum… it’s the size of a rugby ball; the smell – the drill’s set my teeth alight!  When it came to the actual filling part my imagination just couldn’t get hold of what was going on; let’s say it resembled heavy construction work with steel clamps and stuff.  Not to forget the aftermath: lips of inner tubing.

I still visit the dentist today: decades and decay go hand-in-hand. It’s different now: pain is minimal, interaction pleasant and sometimes interesting, technology astounding.  But at an appointment the other day my dentist had a new toy: a wand-like camera that he inserted into the mouth to give me a live, full-colour display of the dark side of the gum. Instead of the usual anonymity of grey-black X-rays coming up on the screen, there appeared the gross pink and puce of raw gum in which stood gravestones of tallow teeth.  He tracked further – it was a horror movie.  Is this what a dentist looks at all day long? Our resident cynic knew what was going on.

The sins of the father have, fortunately, not been visited upon his generations present.  Homegrown, fluoride-tabletted and dentally supervised, my children have allowed me to meet my dental bills on which only my name appears.  But they have had braces, a procedure I went without. Braces were reserved for children whose teeth, caught fleeing the lawless jaw, were then held captive behind barbed wire until such time that they had been rehabilitated.  When their age, having advertisement teeth was not a priority, but digital photography, cellphones and social media have changed that.  Many years of my past hold no photographic record of my presence – perhaps a school team photo at most. Now a daily plethora of images requires teeth to be standing to attention and perfectly aligned.  If not, they will be clamped and braced into place.

Another bullet I have manage to dodge: an abscess.  Now there’s a word.  Sounding like “apsis” – an astronomical term – mistaken for a spiritual leader, and spelt correctly by 0.001% percent of English-speakers worldwide, it is “a swollen area within body tissue containing an accumulation of pus”. (Doesn’t that last phrase just throb with pain?)  It translates to having a cheek like a red balloon touching which sends you to the moon. It’s pain to leave it; it’s pain to lance it.  No wonder the root of the word means: “to go away from”.

When I embarked on my journey in life, providing a salutary lesson for my children and grandchildren was not my intention.  And without trying I have.  When the younger generation shows reluctance to brush their fangs – “I’m too tired to brush” – I open my mouth and display the silverware.  It works.  But it does have a drawback: a chat about toothache the other day did lead to my older granddaughter saying: “Granddad, I don’t mean to be rude but you do have quite ugly teeth.”  Lesson learnt.