A trip to the dentist

There’s a joke going round the internet about a toothache stricken patient going to the dentist.
“Open wide,” says the dentist. After a few moments poking the patient hears the dentist announce “you have a truly enormous cavity” – “you have a truly enormous cavity”.
“Did you have to say it twice? I’m scared enough of coming to see you already!”
“Now you know what I’m talking about” came the response, “I only said it once, the second time was an echo!”

Mildly amusing you might think, except my dentist told it to me. After he’d used enough Novocain to freeze my earlobe as well as most of the right side of my mouth. There’d followed a whole load of drilling with his child-sized, high speed Black & Decker, stuffed into my mouth for what had seemed like forever. The hole he’d thus created in one of my teeth had clearly jogged his memory. “Hmmm, yes, I was thinking this is going to take a lot of time to fill” he added by way of explanation.

Now this is Lebanon where there is not enough electricity to go round, so it is cut off in Beirut, district by district, for at least three hours, once a day. And so it was that half way through the aforementioned drilling, the lights dimmed, the water suction stopped, the drill went silent and the other bits of assorted electronics fell fast asleep. Pragmatic soul is my dentist: “please rinse well and take a short break while I activate plan ‘B’” he intoned, while nipping smartly onto the balcony. With memories of the treadle driven drills of my youth powered by the dentist’s assistant’s feet, I wondered what was coming, and then heard the reassuring sound of his own generator being started. Sure enough everything came back to life after a few seconds.

Things have come a long way since mercury, tin, silver and copper were mixed into an amalgam on site in a mortar and pestle before being skillfully molded in the mouth to form the filling. These days, stuff comes out of a tube and is then coloured to match the receiving tooth. The airports' metal detectors have less and less work to do on me as the years unfold. But no less time and skill are needed to rebuild the drilled tooth so an hour after sitting down, I was finally and gratefully released.

Down the years, I have had a bank manager called Mr. Cash, a school teacher called Mr. Wise, a plumber by the name of Mr. Sockett and my local car-repair man here is called Mr. Saab, so I wish I could relate that my dentist is called Mr. Pullem or something like that. He isn’t, but I think he’ll be referred to as “The Joker” after today.