Sogger’s Blog

Just because you don’t feel the pain, it doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting. One of Kenny’s folksy woman-with-a-piano singers might possibly have written that line, but not about a visit to the dentist. Scoop 5 was a visit to devitalise a tooth that had suffered badly after being pushed around by a Bolshy wisdom tooth who, like his 3 friends, after 40 years of dormancy, had decided to come to life and push towards the centre of my mouth.

If you read the account of that visit, you will see that, afterwards, I was surprisingly upbeat, which is not surprising if you read the accounts of the previous visits. The trouble was that some days later, in this tooth, now forever insensitive to pain, I was pretty sure that part of the filling had fallen out, leaving me with a hollow crater. When you cant feel it, you tend to forget about it, so, for several months, I did nothing. As spookily foretold here, scoop 6 was to arrive in early 2009, but was nothing to do with this hole.

I’m not going to bang on for several thousand words in detail about my oral tribulations. However, over several months, I’ve started developing more pain in other teeth (same side of the mouth). So back it was to see dentist 2. However, when I arrived back at the dentist (head down as I passed dentist 1, bus and tram ride for 1 hour to the surgery), I found that dentist 2 was no more  and had been replaced by, let’s call him dentist 3 -  a dentist younger than my son.

Dentist 3 told me that this time my problem is sensitive gums caused by my marauding wisdom teeth. The solution? Scoops 7 and 8 to devitalise another tooth. The most amusing part about this visit (if anything amusing can be drawn from 8 visits to the dentist), is that, quick as a flash, at the end of scoop 8, on his sexy Mac computer, with his sexy iDentist software, he pulled up the ixRay of my mouth and drag-and-dropped some pieces of dental equipment onto various teeth before handing it to me and announcing to me that this was the estimate for the remaining work, coming to a total of 1200€! And he managed to keep a straight face. Apparently, dentists are now required, for work which is not strictly necessary (about 80% I would estimate), to give you an estimate beforehand in order to avoid any jaw-dropping (sic) surprises at the end of the visit. What he wants to do (if I’ve understood correctly), is put a nail through the filling that is in the devitalised tooth so that it doesn’t fall out in the future (apparently there is a higher risk).

I’m sure that given the active state of my wisdom teeth, scoop 9 is inevitable. However, if he thinks it will be for this frivolous money-grabbing exercise, and if he thinks that he would be the one carrying out the work in any case, he can think again. Looks like it will be time to search for dentist 4.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 12:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.