Teeth. Who needs them?

Durban POISON

THE human body is an incredible machine. With one exception – its teeth. What a terrible oversight. What an appalling design flaw. My liver has put up with years of abuse and yet it continues to filtrate without complaint. My swollen heart still beats like a djembe drum. My knees bend, as do my elbows. My feet have been walking ever since I was two and all 10 fingers work like a charm. I need no help putting on my socks and I can go from sitting to standing in four seconds flat.

But my teeth. OMG. My teeth. They started giving me trouble when I was a pup. Wisdom teeth don’t, as I was led to believe, make you wise. They make you scream and beg for mercy. We aren’t born with a surplus of spleens, so why do we have these superfluous things in our mouths?

“Ah, look,” cried my mother. “He’s got his first teeth!” Then they became all wobbly and started falling out.

Imagine we were born with baby arms that withered and dropped off, allowing our permanent arms to grow. Would an Arm Fairy collect the limbs while we slept, leaving a pile of loose change in their stead? I like to think so.

Teeth, you might assume, would be programmed to grow straight. We don’t, as a matter of course, put our children’s legs in calipers when they turn 12, so why is there an above average chance that they will turn into snaggle-toothed monsters if we don’t make them wear braces? And why aren’t dentists called dontists or orthodontists called orthodentists? Let’s have some consistency, here.

When I was a child I had a dentist who drilled without anaesthetic. His name was Dr Aitken. How fitting. There must have been other dentists – kinder, gentler dentists – so why did my mother keep taking me to the one man who could, without fail, be relied on to inflict excruciating pain? I couldn’t have been that naughty.

I brushed my teeth every night and yet by the time I left school I had so many fillings that whenever I laughed, light would refract off the silverware and temporarily blind whoever I was with.

At one point I had elastic bands holding everything in place. Now and again one would shoot from my mouth and hit someone in the eye. Friends started wearing sunglasses around me.

As I grew, my bones firmed up, my muscles developed, my hair thickened and my teeth crumbled like ancient Egyptian papyrus. Toast, biscuits, peppermints and bacon all took their deadly toll. An apple a day might have kept the doctor away, but the amount of shrapnel regularly embedded in Granny Smith ensured that I was no stranger to Dr Aitken’s torture chamber.

Over the years, the fillings have cracked and fallen out. Molars have split like miniature icebergs succumbing to global warming. Incisors have been scarred and chipped from opening too many beers.

We are carnivores, damnit. We should have teeth like dogs. We should be able to eat our way through not only the steak, but the T-bone, too. Evolution has failed us miserably.

I had a tooth pulled – upper right bicustard – some time ago.

A woman I knew told me the gaping hole gave my face character. I suppose it did, if your character was a diseased old sea dog on a South Pacific pirate ship.

My current dentist is a good man, and I am not just saying this because there is a good chance he will read these words before my next appointment. I used to see him regularly until I decided not to. He was picking up way too many things that needed to be done and I simply couldn’t cope with the kind of decisions he was expecting me to make. Two years went by.

The other day I grabbed a torch and took a good squiz in the mirror. It looked as if a tiny car bomb had detonated inside my mouth. I went back to the dentist. He inspected my chart and, without even looking into my cakehole, provided a rundown of what still needed to be done.

“Er, things have changed a bit,” I said. “Best you take a fresh look.”

Lie back. Sinking feeling. Light on. Mouth open. Eyes shut. Sphincter clenched. Prod, scrape, poke. Silence. Please say something. One of us should. And I clearly can’t.

“Mmm,” he said. In dentistspeak, this translates into, “If you had listened to me two years ago, you stupid bastard, I wouldn’t have to deal with this run-down graveyard of a mouth.”

Then come the options. All I really want is a patch-job and my parking ticket validated. He doesn’t say so, but it is clearly too late for patches of any kind. As far as I can make out, my options include implants, a plate or bridgework. Leaping from the chair and running away seems like the most sensible option.

Apart from that nasty business of screwing each individual tooth into your jawbone, implants are ridiculously expensive. My father has a plate. When I was a kid he would take it out while I wasn’t watching and suddenly come at me with no front teeth. It took years of therapy to recover. I’ll skip the plate. Bridgework it is, then.

First, though, he has to remove a derelict tooth so he can make an accurate mould. Whoopee. An extraction. Next to a root canal, my all-time favourite.

I was on the point of soiling my broeks when he introduced a revolutionary new development in dentistry. It looked like the night vision goggles that US Marines wore while patrolling the streets of Baghdad, except I got to watch Seinfeld instead of wild-eyed Iraqi gunmen.

The tooth was out before Kramer had even made his entrance. I begged him to extract a couple more so I could at least finish the episode, but it can’t be much fun listening to a patient laughing through a mouth full of blood so he told me to rinse and spit and make another appointment.

I told the receptionist to pencil me in for 2017 and fled.