h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's not the pain, drills and fillings, I just don't like dentists...

No. Dentist related phobias and common and rather bad for you dental health in the long term. I suffered from a mild case for a number of years until an incident about two years ago that is probably the ultimate nightmare for dentistphobes out there.

I got tooth ache. In my wisdom teeth. A few days later half of my lower right wisdom tooth dropped out whilst I was eating a rather nice chicken sandwich with all the trimmings. To say that it hurt was an understatement.

I had not been to a dentist for ten years and I had no idea where one was. Despite the agony I put off pulling out the Yellow Pages for two whole days. How I managed I will never know. In the end I made and emergency appointment with a local dentist who claimed they took NHS patients.

He did, he was the junior partner of the practice, although he did have a reassuring chair-side manner. He did something to my rotten tooth which stopped it aching so much, did an X-ray, looked at it for some time whilst tutting, then said I'd have to make an appointment to have what remained of that wisdom tooth and the matching one on the upper jaw removed. It was an abcess in the tooth you see. I can see you cringing right now.

To cut a very long story to one meerly moderate in size I managed to return next week from the extraction process.

The first thing I was frightened of was the needle in the gum. This went by very quickly I was astonished to find that I could feel absolutely nothing very quickly indeed. I guess that those friends who call me naturally insensitive were right after all. It was a very short matter to remove the remains of my rotten lower tooth and I thought to myself 'My, why have I put off going to the dentist all this time?'.

I should, at this point, warn those of a nervous disposition to stop reading and be reassured that going to the dentist is a good thing and really not something to be feared. Really. Thanks for reading this up to now, it's been great, please drop by my space sometime.

Right, only those with hardened constitutions left? Good.

I had only been in the chair for fifteen minutes tops and was contemplating what to do with the rest of my afternoon off work. All the dentist had to do was remove my perfectly healthy upper right wisdom tooth. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

He tugged. Then he tugged some more. The nurse mopped his brow whilst he continued to tug. He continued tugging for another fifteen minutes (I know this to be true, I could see the clock above the door). He reached the point of putting his knee in my chest and tugged some more. The tooth did not budge. The nurse had complimented my on the strength of my gnashers for third time when something finally gave. Unhappily for me it wasn't the dental extraction tool the dentist was using. My tooth sheered in two, the crown coming free leaving the root embedded in the gum with no sticky up bits to get hold of.

The surprise at the positive result of all this tugging meant that the doctor let go of the crown of my wisdom tooth and let it drop straight down the nearest open recepticle, my throat.

Much choking ensued, the tooth re-emerged whilst I was on the verge of going blue, and I got through three glasses of that rather nice medicated pink gargling water that dentists have next to their sucking funnel devices.

After many apologies, the dentist reexamined the disaster area that was my mouth. He examined the X-ray. Rather worryingly he turned it round and looked once more. He then told me that the roots were all that remained of my tooth and they were crossed and well-embedded in my gum. The only way to get them out were to divide them and get them out separately.

This worried me. What did he mean 'divide them'? I couldn't really ask anything though, other than look puzzled. The anaesthetic meant I could only really dribble and make grunting noises. There was no time for coherent discussion of the situation as the dentist pushed my head back on the headrest and rummaged among his tools.

Now he'd already used a fearsome array of weapons, including the drill and I thought there was nothing he could do to that would surprise me. How wrong I was. He pulled out a minature buzzsaw and proceeded to rev it in front of my eyes. The vibrations this tool caused made my eyesight blur.

He sawed and pulled for another half hour, and eventually half a root emerged to be followed ten minutes later by the other half. It was over apart from the stitches, which I'm glad to say, were done seemlessly.

Total time for operation: 1 hour 20 minutes. Total local anaesthetic shots: 5. Mouth soreness duration: 5 days. Stitches: 7. Pain of keeping jaw open for so long: Great.

Is this a record?

The upshot of this horror story is that I am no longer afraid of dentists. They say when you confront you fears and you find they aren't scary/horrible/painful, you lose your fear. They are wrong. It is only when you face your fear and it turns out to be every bit as scary/horrible/painful as you imagined that you lose you fear. After all, nothing that bad could ever happen again, could it?

As a footnote let me add I needed no other dental work at all after and ten year period of avoiding dentists like the plague. Dentist's say you should visit them once every six months. I get the feeling that this only encourages them to use their tools - I say go every year or so and brush your teeth before bed time!