I’ve been very fortunate with the teeth I have and the teeth I’ve had. I can remember quite a lot about my early childhood and even scraps of babyhood, including sitting in my pram and having my finger bittern by a little boy. I was very cross, I can tell you, and it was being cross rather than the hurt which made me cry at the time. Mum had stopped (I guess she was taking me for a walk on a lovely sunny day) to talk to a neighbour down the road. The lady might have been Veronica Birch’s mum, or Michael and David Cobbold’s mum, whoever it was, they were engaged in conversation as I sat up in my pram with my harness on. A little boy, he must have been standing on tiptoe, peeped over the side of the pram and I reached out my hand to him and he bit my finger!!! I cried in outrage and pain – and I guess he was told off and I was comforted, and no doubt his mum apologised, and my mum laughed and said it was one of those things, he was only a little boy after all.
Back to my teeth and not someone else’s teeth they had used to chomp me. I don’t really remember my milk teeth coming through, but I do remember them coming out when my second teeth arrived. I don’t remember the event being painful, I remember wiggling my loose teeth with my tongue, I remember pushing at my not loose teeth, hoping they might become wobbly, I remember the tooth fairy coming and leaving me a 3d or a 6d (pre-decimalisation of course!) Obviously I don;t remember the fairy herself because she came while I was asleep! I remember having gaps in my mouth with the tips of my grown up teeth pushing up. I remember going to the dentist, Mr Betts, who was always so pleasant and cheery and praised me for being a good girl and brushing my teeth properly. I remember going to the school dentist who had a little surgery actually at our school (so children from other schools came to see him too) Some children had to have teeth extracted , and the kind lady dental assistant made dollies from cotton wool plugs with little faces drawn on them, a small strip of bandage wrapped like a shawl round them. I never got a little cotton wool dolly because I never had any teeth taken out and I felt rather sad about this.
So my life with my noble teeth continued without problem, I have no wisdom teeth so there was never any difficulty with their arrival. I took care of my gnashers and was lucky to have strong hard teeth which have served me well, munching their way through many, many different and mostly delicious meals. I have more recently had an extraction, and I do have a couple of crowns now.
I’ve been complacent and laid-back, to be honest, because I’ve always cared for my teeth, brushing at least twice a day, mouth-washing, flossing, regular check-ups and inspections. All has been well… until last Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, when I woke up in excruciating pain because someone set fire to my mouth when I wasn’t looking. Obviously, I didn’t really have a fire in my mouth, but I had a very nasty infection. I went to the dentist first thing in the morning, and she prescribed painkillers and antibiotics. Back home, took to my bed, and lost the next two days in a haze of pain. Fortunately I have an excellent husband who performed all the nursing and husbandly duties – supplying tea, kind words, meds when I needed them, and general comfort and soothe. (There actually is such a word as ‘husbandly’ – adjective relating to or befitting a husband – dating back to the twelfth/thirteenth century.)
I am now back to normal, thank goodness, and due to see the dentist again on Wednesday. What a dreadful experience it was – and I kept thinking of the film ‘Marathon Man‘ with Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier, based on the book by William Golding…. It’s haunting me at the moment… it’s about a dentist who uses his skills to extract not only teeth, but information…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Man_(film)
Lois Elsden 