Random reminder

Press, 12 July 1979, Page 22

Random reminder

OUT OF THE MOUTHS

It’s not just that this particular family’s dentist is the enthusiastic type who ends up straddling the semiconscious patient’s neck, grappling his head in a sort of well-intentioned halfnelson, and removing most of the protective layer from the remaining teeth with a circular hedge-cutting affair that leaves the jaw vibrating for up to three months as punishment for getting tobacco stains on the teeth. That comes into it, of course; but it’s probably his parents’ shared fear of the big injection that comes before the all-out assault on the mouth that has made their eight-year-old something less than brimming over with enthusiasm when his jaw begins to rot away from under him and it becomes time for a bit of repair work.

He has heard his father tell tales of the day the dentist’s needle went through the back of his head, through the plaster wall, across the waiting room (narrowly missing a receptionist)

and out into the street, puncturing the tyre of a parked bus and adding eleven dollars to the eventual dentist’s bill because the dentist had been fined for blocking the street. He knows that his mother is so afraid of hypodermic injections that her dentist usually has to disguise himself as a hatstand and pounce on her from behind as she comes up the stairs to his surgery, clubbing her with a sock full of filling metal before she has time to change her mind and flee. So when the school dental nurse took a look inside his mouth, swayed with shock, fear, and loathing, and told him he would need some fillings done, the family tradition of oral cowardice welled up within him. The dental nurse later told his parents she had never had a reaction like it. He told her, quite calmly: “Thank you very much for your efforts. But I think I may try to make alternative arrangements.”