UPFRONT:AS I TYPE THIS, I have a mouth full of teeth without a single filling. But as you read this, all is changed utterly. Because, after typing the last word, I must begin the long, slow walk to the chair and submit to a filling for the first time in my 35 years on this sugar-coated earth.
And so they come to an end – decades of smug toffee-chewing and the long-held understanding that the no-filling status was some karmic recompense for spending my teens in train tracks, luminous elastics and a head brace that made me look like I’d attempted to swallow a clothes hanger.
Not so. And with the nefarious cavity currently digging its evil way through upper left number 14, bang goes the self-created myth that the stuff I took on at an early age about brushing twice a day and not eating toomany sweets had somehow paid off. Since that first, early lesson about a pea-sized-amount and up-and-down – not-side-to-side – daily brushing, I've been cleaning my teeth with a fervour bordering on the religious. Good for me. Except not only has such rigorous application of received wisdom failed to save me from a cavity, as promised, it turns out my rigour has been too, er, rigorous.
“You’re overbrushing,” said my husband when first he witnessed my daily ablutions.
“You have six fillings,” I replied smugly, spitting disdainfully in the sink and replacing my bristle-splayed brush. I mean, who takes toothbrushing advice from someone with six fillings?
“You’re overbrushing,” said my dentist, as I lay in his purring chair a fortnight ago. Sheesh, whose side are you on? Of course, I couldn’t articulate that, as he had his little clickity implements in my mouth. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. “Yep, definitely overbrushing.”
Overbrushing? Since when has that been a bad thing? I follow the instructions to a T and now you’re telling me that, somewhere in the small print, lay a line about overbrushing? Not fair, is all I’m saying. Except it sounds more like nggngnrrrraaaah, because there’s a mirror on a stick in my mouth.
Sure, I go through toothbrushes quicker than Portsmouth goes through owners, but isn’t that a good sign, for crying out loud?
Yet there I sit, gob open, my dentist regaling me with titbits about my personal life that he has gleaned from the column, while expressing great sympathy with the husband whose life is played out therein, and there’s nothing I can say in my defence. And once he has tut-tutted over my public airing of the marital laundry, and made me swallow my pride while simultaneously spitting that weird pink liquid down the tiny chairside sink, he’s breezily making appointment number two: the filling.
“What could I have done differently?” I ask, reminding him of my regular brushing (although I omit my penchant for Cadbury’s caramel barrels). How could I have prevented this? I brace myself for him to tell me that, if I hadn’t spilled so much of my personal life in print, things could have turned out differently for upper left 14. But it turns out the real problem was not coming to see him in nine years.
He’s right. It had been so long since my last visit that computer technology arrived in the interim. Despite the paint jobs and modern technology, though, the smell and look of the dentist’s surgery send me zipping back in time. Sitting in the waiting room where I fidgeted through most of my childhood, I’m surprised to note that my feet now rest on the floor when I perch on the long benches. But there are no echoes of past discomfort: sure I was the smug, filling-free child, and were it not for my overbite and the wanton proliferation of teeth in a mouth built for far, far fewer, I would have been the poster child for good teeth. Dentists were not to be featured.
Ah, but that was then, and this is now, a now when my parents no longer make my dental appointments, and one year glides easily into the next without the ma marking time by marching me to piano lessons and teeth check-ups. The truth is, the only thing that jogged me into making this appointment was the budgetary decision on dental care, which had me high-tailing it to the dental surgery before it was too late to get it all for free.
But by then, not only was it too late to get it all done for free, it was also too late to save me from the cavity. On top of which, I’m wearing my poor pearlies down with the stress.
“You grind your teeth at night!” he admonishes.
“Ngngnn.”
“Have a sluice around with that pink stuff and spit.”
“Slurp! Gurgle! PAH! Wearing them down?” What if they disappear altogether? “Is there anything I can do?” Though why I would listen to these guys after the lies about brushing twice daily is anyone’s guess.
“There’s a mouth guard you can get to wear at night.” Pause.
“But it wouldn’t do wonders for your marriage.”
Another pause as I sit, silenced, mouth full of tiny silver picks.
“I suppose you could go to the GP and find out what’s making you so anxious.”
My blood pressure immediately goes into orbit.
“But sure, that’s probably just your personality.”
He’s right. This is why I love my dentist. He is the perfect blend of stoicism and tenderness, a kind of fatherly protector with a drill. Of course, that was before he put me down for a filling.
“At least I’ll get a column out of this,” I say, when he brings me out to make my next appointment. For once, I’m going to leave him with his mouth open.
“God almighty, don’t be doing that,” he says, with some concern. He should have thought of that before he put me down for a filling.