You learn something new everyday. Today
I learned that you can drown at the dentist.
My dentist is one of those rare
creatures, an NSH dentist. He is based in the grounds of a now eerily
deserted hospital that is slowly being converted to 'luxury' family
homes. Once a bustling mix of health and community service buildings,
residential homes, wards, mental health facilities, nurseries and all
manner of disparate NHS bits and bobs, set in several acres of tree
dotted green fields, the site is now littered with sealed up
buildings and groups of yellow helmeted surveyors measuring up the
space for development. Here and there the odd service survives; the
wheelchair service occupies a building and my dentist another. The
dental surgery was once part of a complex that included a GP surgery
and a physiotherapy department, but they have been relocated and so
the dentist and his assistant occupy a huge building all by
themselves. This will be my last visit to the site before the
practice moves to another location and the echoing building is razed
to the ground to make way for 2 or 3 bedroom executive residences.
When I arrived the waiting room was
empty so I was denied the chance to read three year old magazines and
was instead ushered straight in. I positioned myself adjacent to the
dentist's chair and tilted my wheelchair back. The dentist, an Asian
gentleman with reassuringly spectacular white teeth, positioned the
light and said, “let's have a look.” A few minutes of probing
later and he declared that all was well apart from a little tartar
that he would now remove.
Armed with the dental equivalent of a
pressure hose he proceeded to blast the offending calculus from my
teeth while his assistant wielded a mini vacuum cleaner to suck away
the debris and excess water. And therein lay the problem. Suck as she
might, water trickled to the back of my throat as I lay back in my
chair. Whereas normally I would have swallowed the excess water I
found that in my prone position I couldn't. And when I breathed I
found that I was breathing in the water. Not wanting to make a fuss I
endured this for as long as I could, before having a coughing fit and
shaking the various implements from my overflowing mouth.
We tried again but it was no good. Each
time I ended up coughing and gagging on water, being looked down upon
by an anxious dentist. Eventually we resorted to old fashioned
scraping. Slightly more painful but better than drowning. Less
embarrassing too.
