I really don’t like going to the dentist. I’m not scared of going, I don’t have any worries about what will happen when I’m there, I just find it all a bit icky. I don’t like someone rummaging around in my mouth and the taste of those blue rubber gloves is just bleugh. I’d rather get my legs waxed.

I dislike seeing the hygienist too for the same reasons. I see them both regularly and never have an issue. I’m my dentist’s star pupil – he always drags all the dental nurses in to look at my teeth “look at these, you don’t get people of this age with such good teeth do you? Look, no fillings or anything. I thought we must have lost your chart but there’s nothing to go on there”. It’s slightly embarrassing but also quite nice, the adult version of being given a gold star or a sticker.

He thinks this is because I spent my early years in America where they are very big on preventative dentistry.  At the time this was not the case in Britain, your teeth were only treated if something went wrong as they were reactive rather than proactive in their approach.  Which is interesting when you live abroad as the stereotype is that English people have bad teeth. Like many stereotypes this was actually based in fact.  We used to have lots of fluoride treatments as kids in the States. The dentist would fill these little trays with a fruit flavoured fluoride goo that we had to sit with in our mouths for what felt like an eternity. It was probably only a couple of minutes at most but when you’re young it is hard to have a proportionate sense of time, particularly when orange flavoured goo is seeping down your throat.    

I particularly dislike the process of someone else flossing my teeth. It really bothers me and makes me feel physically sick. I floss my own teeth daily which is fine but it feels so wrong to have someone else do it – a bit like it would if someone else were to wipe my bottom. Just wrong. Until I get old and senile at least.  I remember when one of my good friend’s acquaintances went through a period of being unnecessarily unkind to him and we decide that if there were such things as karma and reincarnation then surely she would come back into this world as dental floss.

Despite my routine trips to the dentist always being perfectly fine with no issues of note, I have had a couple of negative experiences.  My wisdom teeth never came through properly. The top ones were removed in a fairly straightforward fashion although apparently they were very stubborn and the roots were slightly curled over. Usually the roots are straight. The dentist pretty much had his foot against my face to get some extra purchase in order to pull the bad boys out but finally, away they came. The bottom ones hadn’t made an appearance so they were left alone.

Several years later when I was living in Sydney I had a brilliant dentist, a sweet little man called Joe Poon. He was very nice, very proactive, and very attentive. He filled a large dent in my husband’s front tooth which had been there his whole life but nobody ever thought to fill. Joe’s approach was “why would you walk around with a big dent in one of your front teeth if you could do something about it”?  He put a protective coating on the surfaces of our teeth because again, why wouldn’t you? Just like the States, Australian dentists take a preventive stance towards dentistry.

By this point my lower wisdom teeth had impacted, which means that they were there but below the gum line, tipped up on their side, and taking up space that was ideally suited to my pre-existing molars. It seems that wisdom teeth are a little like cuckoos; turning up and taking up residence in an already coveted space. When teeth are impacted in this way the plan is to cut open the gum, cut the pesky molars into pieces, and remove them. Usually under local anaesthetic. Easy peasy. So an appointment was booked in.

The appointment was booked for two hours which was enough time to remove both teeth and send me on my toothless way. Except it didn’t work out like that. I think my husband – although he was still my boyfriend at the time – came with me on the bus to the dental practice then went off around the mall and had some lunch before coming to meet me again afterwards. Maybe the practice called him to come and meet me when they were done, I can’t recall. The upshot was that instead of removing two teeth in two hours, they were only able to remove one tooth in three hours and had to stop because I was losing too much blood. My curly roots were causing havoc again, wrapping themselves around the nerves in my jaw and refusing to come out. The local anaesthetic started to wear off a bit midway through too “er, excuse me, I can feel you cutting my gums”. Except it doesn’t sound like that with gloved hands and dental instruments in your mouth…… “uh uhuh uh, uh uh uh uh uhuhuh uhuh uh uh”.   

When my husband turned up he was quite shocked – I was a bedraggled blood soaked mess and the dentist was rather stressed.  Three hours in a dentist’s chair had left me with crazy fuzzy hair, there was blood all down my t-shirt and my mouth was still all floppy and lopsided from the anaesthetic. It probably resembled a torture scene from Reservoir Dogs – he was doubtless checking to see how many ears I still had. The plan was to try and persuade the remaining tooth to come out another time once my mouth had settled down a bit. Joe took photos of the roots of the excavated tooth as they were an interesting anomaly, and we left for home.

The dental practice was in a place called Chatswood which wasn’t too far from our home in Neutral Bay. It went through a little place called Crows Nest which had some nice restaurants and bars and it was probably only a 20 minute bus journey in total.  We were on the bus just reaching Crows Nest when I suddenly, very suddenly, felt very sick. No time to tell my husband that I was about to be sick kind of sudden. The bus stopped and I quickly leapt up and off. I looked up and saw the bus pulling away, my husband’s confused and concerned face gliding off along with it. I can still picture the look on his face and it still amuses me, he must have been so confused as to what was going on – why would I just jump off the bus in a place we didn’t live without even telling him?

I walked home, feeling less nauseous, but woke up the next day and threw up through my mouth full of stitches. Gross. About five minutes later the dentist called to warn me that I might feel or be sick due to all the anaesthetic. That was a case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted wasn’t it?  Anyway, I lived on SlimFast shakes and KFC potato and gravy for a few days whilst my gums healed and the stitches dissolved, and my cuckoo infested gums healed nicely.

I had a more successful second extraction and my dental appointments ever since have been largely without drama. Apart from the audience that is dragged into the room every appointment to marvel at my teeth and charts.

On reflection, perhaps I do have reason to be apprehensive about the dentist given the cuckoo bloodbath, but that is the only negative experience I have ever had. And it all felt so surreal that I don’t think I even found it to be a negative experience. Apart from the fact that I had naively worn a white t-shirt from which the blood stains were never able to be fully removed. My main area of concern still centres around the floss and the taste of those disgusting blue gloves. Weird eh?