Speaking became difficult. Laughing was out of the question. My gums were so sore that my tongue was banned from touching them. Yet somehow, with a mind of its own, playing with them was all it seemed to do.
I was reduced to eating mush. And a sneeze brought tears. So after a month of agony and torment, I decided my remaining two wisdom teeth must go.
Sympathy from my wife was noticeably lacking. Having just given birth for the third time, Rachel clearly felt that my ailment had the equivalence of a mozzie bite.
Regarding me as an unwanted drama queen she promptly locked the medicine cabinet in the belief that any resort to it would represent a waste of panadol.
Still, she comforted me by assuring all would be well unless, of course, they broke my jaw.
Rachel has no medical experience, but she does have significant legal experience – as a medical negligence lawyer – and vast life experience in winding me up. She had me worried.
I was advised that the procedure would occur in the dentist’s chair. I was told that I wouldn’t remember a thing. And that was lucky as the operation involved the dentist taking to the back of my mouth with a large pair of pliers. If the teeth didn’t come out easily (and I couldn’t imagine how they would) then the pliers would be replaced with a saw and the teeth would be cut into pieces before they were excised.
The vision of a dentist with shirt sleeves rolled up and a knee in my chest yanking out my wisdom teeth amidst a shower of blood left me feeling that the whole affair would be less like medicine and whole lot more like a mix of carpentry and butchery.
When the day came and I sat in the chair with the anaesthetist administering his potion, I was about to change my mind and ask him to stop, when suddenly I awoke in the recovery room. Apparently I had survived.
Despite the excellent dental care I received, my months of pain had me intrigued as to how people endured toothaches in a world before dentists, anaesthetics, and miniature electric saws.
Voltaire once said that: “the art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” Yet if nature’s cure for a toothache is to let the tooth rot until it falls out of its own accord then this process might take a year in which time there would be a world of pain. For a toothache, distraction might even be harder for the medic than extraction.
Surely, in centuries past, life must have been dominated by toothache?
In medieval England dentistry went hand in hand with hairdressing. On the shelves of the barber-dentists of the twelfth century would be scissors and a set of pliers. A painful extraction would come with a trim.
A mixture of crushed newt and beetles was said to assist greatly in relieving the pain associated with tooth extraction. While placing one’s mouth over the smoke which emanated from a candle containing henbane-seed and acorn-meal would have the effect of killing tooth worm.
James Wymbrandt in The Excruciating History of Dentistry tells us that just a few minutes of this treatment would result in dead tooth worms falling from the patient’s mouth.
I must say the very idea of tooth worms is enough for one to bow down in prayer and thank the Lord for being alive in the 21st Century. My extraction was suddenly feeling less dramatic.
Teeth can be an odd business. Universities will devote a faculty to the medicine of the whole human body but for one exception, and then they have an entire faculty devoted to teeth: dentistry.
In public policy dentistry has always been treated a little bit separately to other parts of health. With more than half a million takers certainly the Rudd Government’s teen dental program makes me glad and proud.
Healthy teeth are as critical to our overall health as any other part of our anatomy. Yet perhaps uniquely teeth define where we fit into life. Of the many physical traits which differ between those living in the third world and those living in the first one of the most stark is teeth. A bright smile says so much.
Rachel and I have both had painful summers. She gave life to Georgia and I bravely fought off a toothache.
For Rachel it has confirmed her view about the contrasting pain thresholds of boys and girls. She knows she’s had a helluva summer, and she also knows I’m such a boy.
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