OK so I go in to the dentist’s the other day, because like 80% of the English speaking world, I’m a little slacker than I should be and put off going to the dentist as often as I should. OK, so the last time was about 8 years ago. I’d like to justify that by underlining how difficult it is to get a dental appointment in London, and then how skull-f*ckingly expensive it ends up being once you’ve seen them. But I digress.
One of the things I wanted looked at was a teeny weeny little hole that had developed in one of my wisdom teeth. Well, sort of a hole, and a little bit had chipped off. You know when you catch your tongue on these things, and think “Hmm, I must get that taken care of”? Well like that.
So yesterday was the big appointment to get the offending article wrenched out. I’ve never had a tooth extraction before, but I imagined it wasn’t a lot of fun based primarily on the testimony of others, and the evolution of the simile “As much fun as pulling teeth”.
We’d already ascertained that it was a simple-ish job, because the x-ray showed that the roots weren’t fused to the bone (i.e. good news !).
So to (uncharacteristically) cut a long story short, a couple of injections and a couple of minutes with a weird pointy crowbar thing, and it was job done ! There’s pictures of the tooth in question here, here and here, however I’m warning you – it’s not pretty. I only really put them up here because Eldo and Beaker dig that sort of thing. Sufficed to say, it’s enough to scare you into brushing 12 times a day for the rest of your life.
And no abusive emails telling me how vile it is, either !! When you’re a dedicated investigative blogger like me, sometimes the truth gets a little ugly. It all comes with the territory…
The fun part was that after it was all done, the instructions were to not eat anything hot, or that had to be chewed, for 24 hours: icecream was recommended. That bit of advice seemed weird to me, because surely it’s things like icecream that cause this sort of thing to begin with. Bugger it – if the dentist prescribes icecream, that’s all the encouragement I need.