Dentistry

Oh God. The dentist.

I drove from Brighton throbbing with pain. I probably should’ve taken the train, but I couldn’t leave Bergman in Brighton as I’m driving to Hounslow for work first thing tomorrow. So I whizzed up the road. I made it despite the fug of pain. Goodness knows how my driving was. Lesson learnt.

I’ve learnt about dentists now as well. There are plenty of baddies out there. My last dentist wanted to tear all my teeth out and then dissolve me in acid. It took me a while to figure out the extent of his depravity. He was NHS and I was broke so I let him get away with way too much because it was cheap and I thought I needed it. The dentists I’ve found now are trying to help remedy the physical damage while I get on with the business of trying to overcome the psychological damage he caused. It’s slow. I’ve had so much bad and unnecessary work done. I still feel sick when I think of what he did. He replaced all my perfectly good white fillings with amalgam, but misled me into thinking I was just having new fillings. He must have known he was misleading me. Every time he started I asked if he could do them white, thinking they were new. From the question he must have known I thought they weren’t replacing the white ones. But all be did was refuse, then cut out my perfectly good fillings, dig out more of my teeth, and put mercury and lead into my face. It only came out when I said after the final one “So how many fillings must I have now. There’s the white ones and all these new ones,” and he said “oh no sir, we’ve been replacing the white ones.” I believe at the time I said “Why the fuck would you do that, you fucking butcher?”

I can’t even write about it. I still feel powerless and angry and sad and I have to sleep soon. I’m shaky thinking about it. Bastard. Stupid mean weird bastard.

Tomorrow more workshops. This morning I said farewell to the cat palace. I don’t think I’ll be back again. I said goodbye to the little fluffy ones and made my painful way back up to London.

The temporary filling I’ve got takes some of the pain away but it’s still pretty bad, to be honest. I’ll sleep okay though. I’m hoping we can get some work done to fix the fucker as it’s an important tooth for biting. Dentistry is such vulnerable work. I wish that bastard hadn’t made it psychologically difficult as well. Sometimes I am too amenable.

It was interesting and horrible to see the inside of my mouth on his big magnification screen. “We’ve all lost two years,” he told me. “If you’d followed this up sooner there’s more I could’ve done.”

I first went to him just before the pandemic. I would have done more of this much sooner if things hadn’t gone tits up. I’m a bit blocked as well by my experiences with the butcher. All will be well…