extraction

I have expensive teeth—not gold or titanium or ivory, but ragged columns of chalk. For sixty years they’ve been disintegrating. Two years ago a partial denture replaces four lower teeth. Now my denture has been sent away to have two new ‘teeth’ added.

I step into Marzena the Polish tooth-puller’s surgery at ten, knowing that lower left five comes out today. It’s useful life is over. Most of it is filling. As if to warn me of my fate, lower right five sheds part of itself when I brush on Friday night. It’s slated for filling today.

More new equipment adorns the surgery; a large computer monitor is mounted above the chair, and both dentist and dental nurse have Melrose Dental monogrammed in cursive script on the breasts of their milk-chocolate coloured uniforms.

Once more the chair turns me upside down. I take off my glasses. “Don’t you want to look at me?” Marzena asks. Well, actually I do. She has a haunting hard-faced Slavic beauty. I’m not into bondage, but if I were, I could be a slave to this woman’s formidable dominatrix. I stare up at those lovely lashes as she prepares LR5 by drilling out the rottenness.

She sighs, tells me again that this tooth is too far gone. It’s root-filled, dead, extraction unnecessary: it just needs flattening at the gum line. She lets me consider this while prepping a needle big enough for a horse enema. Three times it punctures the gum around LL5 and knocks on the bone below.

She hands me a mirror, shows me why LR5 has no future: it wobbles at the slightest touch of her pointy dentist’s implement. Out, I gesture with a finger flick. She flicks LR5 and it flips out of my mouth as though only saliva had kept it there. More drilling and various vile concoctions finish off what’s left of it.

The left side of my face is now numb, but before the extraction, moulds must be taken for the remodelling of my new less-partial denture. She wodges the upper mould onto my teeth. I put on my glasses, raise the mirror, and Hannibal Lecter looks back.

LL5 is so rotten she can’t jemmy it out and the extraction takes about ten minutes. What feels like a Continental pillow is inserted to staunch the bleeding. I’m handed instructions on a sheet of A4 paper: no food, no drink, especially hot, no smoking, no exertion, no aspirin—thins the blood when we want clotting. These are non-issues. I have no teeth and no denture.

I pay and depart, catch sight of myself in a shop window, gauze dangling from my numb mouth. I tuck it back in. I wait on windy train stations, mope on the train. Back home I’m assaulted by the telephone; work, a mate, my good woman, a Telstra courtesy call. An Indian representative of an energy company turns up on my doorstep to offer me a better deal.

I tell the world to fuck off, swallow two paracetamol, and sleep on the couch for two hours.

Rock on.