Dentistry

On Wednesday, Dr Prisonsongbaby (Dr P) and I went to a periodontist in Market Street, dragging Solly and Dom along with us. Our mouths were a disaster - and half of them still are. (Scalar root planing is fairly intense and so the good Dr C only did half of his work - concentrating on just the left sides of our mouths). The number of needles required to complete the process without toe-curling pain was five for Dr P and four for me, with Dr P lucky to even get a big shiny silver spine straight into the roof of her mouth. That must have been special.

The result was that we left the Market Street surgery mid-morning looking less like dental victims than stroke victims - with the left sides of our faces falling off like Dali's clocks. Dr P actually suggested that we looked like we'd actually met at a Young Stroke Victim Support Network and had later started a family together. Every time I tried to say a word beginning with "S" my mouth made a farting sound. The producers of Australian Story would have loved it.

To understand dentistry, forget the high grades, white coats, and city addresses. Dentistry is a trade. Our periodontist has good postgraduate qualifications in dental medicine - but, more importantly, lots of shiny metal tools and a pair of extraordinarily strong wrists. There's something incongruous about it all - a branch of medicine in the twenty-first century that actually looks like dentistry does. It doesn't take a massive leap of historical imagination - if we discounted, of course, the advanced degrees and a working knowledge of anaesthetics - to realise that dentistry retains much of it barbershop origins. 

Dr C sharpened his scraper on his scraper sharpener, planted the saliva sucker, and just got in there and filed and chiseled for around forty minutes. He didn't even fill. He was red and huffing by the end of this exquisite and well-credentialled pounding of my face.

"That might have been quite tiring but it's over now," he said.

"Actually, it looks kinda tiring for you."

"It is - it's exhausting, actually."

He let out a long sigh.

I wouldn't encourage you to feel pity for him. This is certainly not the moral of the blog: "feel sorry for dentists." We gave him more than $1000 bucks to go ahead with the ordeal. I doubt he'd still be so committed to the health of people's teeth and gums if it was him who was paying for the operations. 

A stupid point to finish on, no doubt.