Slipping into the weird but not so wonderful world of nothingness

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Being a child of the 1960s, visits to the dentist were few and far between . . . well in fact quite non-existent. I can remember one dental inspection at primary school when a visiting dentist did something like a three-minute inspection of our choppers, giving them an occasional tap with an appropriate type of a light instrument. Some of my classmates, in their innocence, came back out from the inspection believing that a tooth had been pulled.

My mother, although quite an enlightened woman in many ways, had a theory about what she regarded as the ‘over-brushing’ of teeth. She believed that excessive use of the toothbrush would lead to a loss of enamel on the teeth so the whole practice of brushing tended to be quite irregular.

In the long run of course, this strategy had its consequences, and although my teeth escaped the dentist’s chair through my teenage years, the next decade was quite a different kettle of fish, when all the years of neglect came back to haunt me.

It led to my first ‘confrontation’ with a no-nonsense dentist in the town of Tuam whose efforts to insert a long needle under a decaying molar, resulted in an involuntary action on my behalf to catch his hand and immediately remove it from the vicinity of my mouth.

After a little toing and froing, and a stern warning from the dentist that ‘we had to get one thing straight’ – namely that he was the boss of this operation – I eventually succumbed but all didn’t end well. Over a day later, I discovered that a fragment of the tooth that should have been extracted still remained in place, leading to a rather painful self-extraction process. Alas the trauma of that visit ensured that another extended lull period developed in terms of any visits to the dentist’s chair.

Since then, I had the good fortune to meet the most professional and considerate of dentists in Woodquay, whose only fault was his tendency to hold quite erudite one-way conversations with me about everything from politics to philosophy, to which my only reply could be the odd ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ given the compromised position of my verbal outlet.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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