I broke a tooth. I dunno when. Yes, I was present at the time but I don’t
catch everything. My eyes don’t see too well these days and I can be a bit
absent minded.
A few weeks back, my tongue found that an upper molar no longer had a side, nor
had it a middle. The wall had collapsed
and there was nothing within.
This took a bit of getting my head around .... as it were.
After a week of contemplating the inevitable I paced the neighbourhood looking
for an NHS dentist. All I could get was
one who’d see me in a month. I turned to
Google and the phone. It took me another
two days. It can get wearing and it’s something very personal.
One number I was put through to a call centre in India !!
Another I was put on call waiting. “Your
call is important to us.” Obviously it
isn’t.
111 I wasn’t prepared to queue for.
A lot of them didn’t do NHS despite their Goog listing.
One was ambiguous about it and had an online registration. Fuck off.
This is the structure of my skull I’m worrying about, I need to talk to
someone.
Eventually I found someone near Baker St who was prepared to see me in a
week.
So it came to pass, I went over and
found I was in the hands of a 4’10” micro babe with a personality the size of a room. This instills
confidence in the likes of me in a tight spot.
I was laid flat and she had a look. X
Rays taken and it looked like it felt.
She said she could attempt an extraction but it was difficult and it
might end up having to be finished in hospital.
Or I could opt for a direct hospital extraction, she didn’t know when
that might be. There’d be a wait.
I told her I was a “let’s do it now” kinda guy.
If she was up for it, I’d give it
a go.
I was booked in for a week later. In the
course of that week it began to give me gyp.
Psyched up, I trucked over for noon last Monday 16th. She was half an hour late. :facepalm:
We ran through the options again and I gave consent. X Rays were taken (good ol’ Roentgen) and I
laid horizontal. I was numbed up, a process
different to my last experience (15 ?? yrs ago),
a lot of pinpricks giving a quick, very local anaesthesia.
I was told to wave my left.hand if I wanted her to stop anytime.
I dunno what they did to hold my mouth open, couldn’t see a thing through the
eye sheild I’d been given and I couldn’t feel it. Anyway, she quickly got stuck in with her
molar-grips.
She told me she was rocking it around to loosen it, and every now and then she
would chant the mantra “keep breathing, keep breathing”. I don’t know why, it was meaningless to me. Why wouldn’t I ?? Mebbe it’s something they teach them at
dental school to keep the rhythm going, like sailors sang sea shanties when
pulling ropes.
I’d no idea of time through this. It all
seemed very instant. Some way in, I
started to get jolts of pain and this was obvious so I got more numbed up.
She was pressing hard down on my lower jaw, as if using it as a pivot or
something and I had to wave my hand to tell her about this.
It was getting a bit white knuckle.
We got to a point where she told me she’d got most of the tooth out but, as
feared, it had fractured and the bit remaining ran deep. She had another go and more pain. She called in a colleague for consultation
and, after more delving, concluded they couldn’t knock me out enough to keep me
quiet and it was a hospital job.
She led me, in a shaky daze, back to reception where I put my X on some form
then I shook her hand. We’d just been
through so much together.
When I got outside I realised I’d been too confused to put my mask on before
going into reception. Too late now.
Getting home I necked a couple of pain killers and they came up just in time
for the pain foretold.
I looked at my copy of the paperwork and realised that I’d been on the table
for 80 mins Then I lay down, I was well
jarred.
Yesterday I Googled how long an upper molar extraction would take. Twenty to forty minutes. Hey ho.
