Return to the chair of fear brings its mixed blessings

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It really is hard to figure out when you’re getting bad or good news from your dentist. As the years pass, if he or she, tells you that your teeth are in good shape, the inescapable vista looms in front of you that your gnashers are going to survive a lot longer than the other parts of your body. If, on the other hand, he says that ‘there’s a lot of work needing to be done’, you know that you’re destined for a year of fear, excavations, long needles, fillings and maybe even a mention of root canals.

Sometimes a year passes, neigh maybe even two or three, without a return to that shining reclining chair, a piece of furniture that still puts the same shiver down my spine as it did on my first visit to a tooth doctor many years, even decades ago.

As a general rule of thumb, most of the dentists that have crossed my path have been the most professional and kindest of humans but I still feel that they’re making a fairly serious trespass into my person when the jaws have to open wide and that pair of gloved hands – holding various mechanical contraptions – prepares to enter the hidden world of gums, teeth, gaps, cavities and pimpled tongues.

Alas, there was one exception to that general rule and it happened a good few decades back, when a teenage period of extended neglect eventually led to a belated visit to a dentist, long since gone to his eternal reward.

This man had a reputation for ‘taking no messing’ and an early ‘conflict of interest’ arose when he approached my unprotected mouth with a needle that appeared, in my mind’s eye, to be about three inches long. Already the hallucinations had started.

Just as he was about to enter the forbidden area with his ‘super-needle’, my right hand – in what I’d swear was a completely involuntary movement – quite gently caught his arm and pulled it away at least two feet from the threatened gum line.

He lived up to his reputation though, and looked me straight in the eye before uttering the following sentence in a tone that would have done Anthony Hopkins proud: “Young man, let’s get one thing straight. Either you want me to pull this tooth or you don’t.”

Were it not for the fact that I hadn’t enjoyed a decent hour’s sleep for the previous two weeks with a throbbing ache in my right jaw, I might have gone for the latter option, but I stumbled out some kind of apology, closed my eyes, prayed like hell, and let the man have his evil way.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.