Teeth

Excruciating pain requiring urgent dental work can be debilitating and when treatment is withdrawn we condemn people to a period of absolute misery.

Therefore, it is difficult to understand why any government would seek to disadvantage those in need and jeopardise the health of its people.

Yet that is precisely what the Gillard Government intends to do from next January when it proposes to close the Medicare Chronic Disease Dental Scheme (MCDDS). The MCDDS provides $4,250 in Medicare benefits for dental treatment over a two year period for those with chronic disease referred to a dentist by a GP.

Continue reading "Gillard’s dental plan rotten" »

I was number three. But by 10.30, I was at the top of the list and so was wheeled out of the ward and into a special waiting bay. The waiting bay was in a corner and I had been placed facing the wall - like a recalcitrant student. So there I lay, freezing my relatively exposed ass off in a shitty hospital gown. Wondering why, after nearly a decade of spirited resistance, I had accepted my dentist’s advice to get my wisdom teeth out.

Denied a view, I began to listen to the workaday sounds around me. Behind me I could hear nurses, encouragingly asking after each other’s flu recovery. But the aural landscape was dominated by what seemed to be some kind of building works – a concrete drill perhaps, interspersed with staccato bursts of chiseling.

Prone to episodes of extreme self-absorption, this seemed a useful reminder that, although I lay in rigid anticipation of the extraction, the rest of the world had not in fact stopped, rather, it was getting about its business.

Continue reading "The getting of wisdom teeth extracted" »