About five weeks ago, I was sitting having breakfast, eating some cereal that was a strange mixture of oats, honey, coconut, dried banana and chocolate, when I crunched down on a foreign body. It might have been a sunflower seed, or a ball-bearing, for all I knew, but the effect was the same. My upper right hand molar cracked and a goodly portion of it disappeared down my gullet with the cereal.
I finally managed to see my dentist today. He’s a busy man – after all, he works four afternoons a week. I have no fear of the dentist’s chair, or his drill. The only fear I have is the impact on my wallet. My dentist frowns on the National Health Service. He abandoned that vital principle a number of years ago. He only sees private patients and only then if they pass the Means Test.
I first started going to him 25 years ago, when my teeth weren’t the colour of old piano keys. He rented an old tobacconist’s shop in those days and worked by himself. He didn’t wear rubber gloves, or make his patients wear safety glasses, because this was before the health and safety wallahs tightened their grip on the populace. As time went by, his practice flourished and he took on partners and dental hygienists and bought the tobacconist’s and another four adjacent shops, and created the dental equivalent of a mini-mart.
He took an x-ray of my molar – number 7, he called it. He made his assistant, a pretty blonde girl, write it down. He rubbed his hands with glee.
‘You’ve made a right mess of that,’ he said. ‘All I can do with it is fit a crown.’
‘How much?’ I enquired. He consulted a notebook that lay on one of his benches.
‘I wouldn’t recommend gold these days,’ he said. ‘It’s too bling. Besides, it’s far too expensive. You could have metal,’ he reflected, ‘but it’s not guaranteed. No, what I recommend is a new technique, only a year old. I’ve had some success with it.’
‘I’m not sure I like to be a guinea-pig.’ I said.
‘Pshaw, that’s nonsense. I recommend the use of Opalite. It’s foolproof, and the advantage is, it’s tooth-coloured.’
‘What, yellow?’ I said.
‘No, shining white, the way you would aspire your teeth to be.’
‘How much?’ I repeated.
‘Well, I’ll do it for the same price as metal, and I’ll give you a five-year guarantee.’ He did some sums on a pad.
‘That works out at £509. Mind, that doesn’t include the price of a new core, if I have to rebuild that. That’s another £98.’
£600, for one tooth. That’s more than I’ve paid for all of the clothes and most of the cars I have acquired in a moderately long lifetime.
‘Now I’ll give you a temporary stopping and I’ll take the cast for the crown,’ he said.
He gave me three jags with the needle and commenced work with his drill, whilst the pretty assistant squirted water down the back of my throat from a sort of soda-syphon attached to a hose. I nearly choked once and had to throw up my hand for the dentist to stop. He frowned at me as if I had no business disturbing his handiwork.
He finished drilling after an age and picked up from a cabinet what looked like a pair of blue gums. He shoved one onto my upper set. The blue gums contained some soft squishy stuff like blue-tack. It tasted like radioactive cat food. In a few minutes this stuff had set.
‘It sticks pretty tightly’ he said. ‘You may feel a little pressure on your upper jaw as I take it off.’ He pulled at my mouth so violently I thought he had burst my lip. He almost had to put his knee in my chest before the blue gum would give, but eventually it came away with such force he nearly fell over backwards. It was the same rigmarole with my lower jaw.
He stopped up the great crevice with temporary filler and winched me up in the seat.
‘Come back in three weeks. In the meantime, this temporary stopping is soft and malleable, so don’t eat anything sticky till tomorrow. Goodbye.’
I tottered out into the waiting-room. I had been lying in his chair for fifty-five minutes. My jaw felt as if I’d been the recipient of a number of left-hooks from ‘Enery’s ‘Ammer. The taste in my mouth was as foul as a sewage farm in Zanzibar
The plump and pretty receptionist looked at me with not a single shred of sympathy.
‘Cheque or Visa debit, sir?’ she said.
