Good evening and a very warm welcome.

Tonight my story is entitled:

Be Afraid, be Very Afraid

 
To put it bluntly, I would trust a dentist as much as I would, leaving a child alone with a Rottweiler.

 I feel sure that William Goldman who wrote the novel and screen play for the film Marathon Man, starring Dustin Hoffman must, just like myself, have endured horrific experiences at the hands of so-called dentists.  It stands to reason otherwise he could not have written such a grisly novel on the subject.  For those not familiar with the film, it relates to a young student who is tortured by a former Nazi concentration camp dentist who seeks to extract information from him, through his teeth!

 My first disturbing experience with a dentist was when I was aged 10 years old.  He was a youngish man with flaming red hair, steely green eyes and a very, very short temper.  It was in Glasgow, Scotland during the 1950’s.  Entering the surgery, just he and I, he sat me down in the chair and closed the curtains so that the room was cast into a pale light.  A pocket watch appeared in his hand and this voice beyond the pale light instructed me to follow its swaying action until my eyes got so heavy that the only thing they wanted to do, was to go into a deep sleep.

Of course, I had not intention of going into any deep sleep. To be truthful, he was my worst nightmare and my senses told me that I should remain awake no matter how much he scowled at me.  It only took the sound of the electric drill whirring up to have him realise that his hypnotic methods had failed for I sprung up out of that chair like a frightened antelope and ran screaming to my mother in the waiting room.  I remember him berating my mother and telling her to take me elsewhere for treatment for he had not time nor patience for insubordinate children such as I.  Thank goodness she did.

 My next memorable encounter with dentistry was in Germany.  An RAF dentist to be precise who was only required to do a minor filling.  Injection done I was told to sit outside whilst the injection took its effect.  A strangeness crept over my face and then a sudden realisation hit me that I could not make my eyes move in their sockets.  There I sat like a zombie in that corridor with bulging frozen eyes and to say the least, a little concerned about my welfare.  It was becoming obvious to me that he had inserted his syringe into the wrong area of my palate.  He too was not amused when he saw the results of his handiwork so tried again with a second injection.  Needless to say that one was quite happy to freeze up my eyes again.  In desperation he finally called upon another dentist to administer the 3rd anaesthetic.  Thankfully, this time it worked and the tooth was frozen.  Who knows, from then until eternity I could still be waiting in that corridor with frozen eyes if he had not sought help from someone else; or maybe, just maybe, he too might have resorted to chancing his hand at a bit of hypnosis.

 To this day I still walk around with that dentist’s craftsmanship in my mouth.  From a healthy molar which only required a minute filling I now have a piece of ironwork for a tooth that looks similar to a stump of an oak tree that has been hacked down.  This incident happened many years ago, so who knows, he’s probably a civilian now with his own practice and you are his next appointment!

 Now I mustn’t forget to tell you about my ex-Naval dentist who was without a shadow of a doubt a man who liked his drink no matter what time of the day it was.  Hospitals have that smell about them, dentist’s surgeries have that smell about them but this dentist definitely had that smell of gin about him.  It was an extraction required this time so I braced myself for the worst.  Out came the tooth and at the same time, out came the screams from a fossilized face leering down at me.  “Why didn’t you tell me you were a bleeder” it yells with a slurring voice?  As if I could answer with swabs being forced into my mouth and his warm sticky sweat dripping down onto my forehead.  So I was a bleeder, well that was news to me, but I can assure you, I wasn’t the only Bleeder in the surgery that day.

 My worst ever encounter was with a lady dentist.  Now surely being of the same gender as myself, she would prove to be far more competent than her male counterparts.   Just how wrong can you be sometimes?  It was a filling required on this occasion and to all intents and purposes everything seemed to go fine, that is until I stepped out of the surgery and into the street.  Looking down I noticed that my blouse and jacket were covered in blood.  Touching my numbed lips my hand came away drenched in fresh blood which dripped in a steady stream onto the pavement at my feet.

 Rushing back to my car I pulled down the vanity mirror and tried to see where the blood was coming from.  Another horror in my life was there waiting to knock me for six.   She had filled the tooth, that is for sure, but in the process had sliced through my tongue with the drill.  A one inch gash was gushing blood like water running down the sink drain once the plug had been pulled.  How on earth could she have not known what she had done and then to say nothing into the bargain? 

 They say that in the majority of cases, dentists are failed doctors who never made it through Medical School and I really do tend to believe that. 

 I may just have been unfortunate during my time spent with dentists but if the truth were really known, I doubt very much that I am, a unique case.

 I have heard say that our cousins, the Americans, regard the British as having very poor teeth compared to the pearly whites they are so proud to possess.  Well now dear cousins you know why.

 It takes some nerve to be a patient in that chair and it takes some nerve too for a dentist to call himself one.   Please, you have been warned.

© Rebecca Rowan 2007