My life may appear to have been wild, windswept and interesting with all the traveling and living in foreign cultures (ahem) etc.. Oh yes, it may seem to have been quite a wild old ride altogether…unless you’re my teeth.
My pearlies are a fucking shambles, man. There, I’ve said it. They are a crumbling monument to neglect. A derelict, if functioning, series of mishap, misuse, poor care and lack of love. To be honest I never even considered my teeth until I was well into my ’20s. I took decent dental health as a given into my ’30s even. ?I went regularly in the UK, manly because it was free to do so, and mostly my teeth got a clean bill when I did go. I had a good dentist in Canada – Dr Johnson – so cool that I looked forward to going to see him. He and a Japanese chap had a clinic in a crap stripmall in the Northeast. My period in their care marks the only time in my life I felt secure in my choice of dentist – shit there were times I’d go for my 6 monthly check up and Johnson, dressed in his customary Aloha shirt, would cheerfully say “looking pretty good, man, nothing to be done here”. I even got out of one visit without paying for the checkup fee – Johnson winking at me with his wild eyes through the ’70s teardrop glasses, saying “nice work, sir”. And he understood my aversion to having to go to the hygenist every visit – I HATE that tingly, sore feeling after their gritty ministrations and Dr. J knew where I was coming from. We were fully 5 x 5 on my dental needs. Dr. Johnson, you mad looking sonofabitch, wherever you are – you are legend. These are the glory days I remember when I wonder where it all went wrong.
Then it was Japan. I was pretty much covered in Japan, it never cost me amounts I couldn’t pay out of my pocket, let’s just say. It was just that the dentists there were so damnably, worryingly rubbish that you avoided going no matter what. I went to a few, just to confirm this suspicion, and talked to any other foreigner who’d had experience and yes – they all reported grim misgivings about the state of dental things in Nippon. They always looked worried there. They had the natural Japanese aversion to dealing with foreigners, mostly, fearing that somehow foreign teeth and Japanese teeth were not equal, but it was more than that. There was a lot of under the breath talking to the hygenist or suddenly rushing out of the room after untoward noises in my mouth. The end result, anyway, is that I have half a mouthful of glittering silver caps where perfectly fillable teeth once stood. Their aversion to putting in fillings is something none of them satisfactorily explained to me, even when my Japanese was sufficient to understand them. At the mere sign of a cavity they’d simply root canal to blitz the feeling, grind off the remaining good porcelain, dig in a pin and shove a big fake on it in your choice of silver (cheap) fake white (expensive) or gold (astronomical). I went with silver. I was cheap.
A lot of it’s my fault too -for example the latter period of my time in Japan saw a period of stress unlike any other in my life and I began to grind quite hard. My teeth. While asleep mainly. My already weakened stubs weren’t fit for purpose, suddenly, and accordingly began to ache and give in something shocking. I then found myself back in Scotland which was eye deep in a dental crisis whereby local dentists had, on the stroke of graduation, apparently, gone straight to the airport for somewhere where dentists got paid and were able to live in great comfort. This meant that only the shite ones, the old ones, the weak-willed ones with no ambition whatsoever were left and they were struggling to cope with the growing crisis that 5-packs of fresh cream eclairs for 1 pound 50 at Tesco had wrought on this already dentally afflicted nation. They had decreed shortly before my return that if you were not registered on the books of a dentist by such and such a date, then you were out of luck. The result was that greedy dentists filled their books (for they get a fee for every patient per year regardless of the amount of care ministered) with hapless punters they had neither the time nor the inclination to actually do any dental work on. suddenly people talked about a dentist’s appointment as a mythological Eden – a starry-eyed dream for those on BUPA.
The government’s answer to this globalisation-made catastrophe was Poland. They started bringing in chartered plane-fulls of eager Polacks with alleged post secondary qualifications. My experience revealed that these qualifications may have been from a trade college or something because half of them seemed like they’d be better with a brickie’s hod or trowel than the expensive instruments my government was handing them to work in the tiny building site that is my gob. After being back in Scotland and in great dental discomfiture for a year and a half, I was finally enrolled as a patient at a brand new, 100% Polish dental clinic in the centre of town. It was a further 3 months before they could fit me in for an appointment. When I finally hauled my creaking jaws up those stairs, you can bet your life I was keen. I’d have let a guy with a hammer and chisel into my oral chamber in a heartbeat, so achy and niggly had things become in there. The living room door and a length of string had occurred to me in all earnestness more than once.
At the top of those stairs there were 4 practice doors: one belonged to a young, tanned, capable looking male dandy. His shoes alone made me trust he could do the business. Then there was a blonde, tanned, lithe young lady that would not have looked out of place in an Eastern Bloc special of Female Order Wives Weekly – beautiful yet again you’d have trusted her clean crisp uniform if it was empty. A 40-something lady popped in and out of the third room smiling, in a hurry, a grafter. The fourth door remained resolutely closed for the entire 45 minute wait as I read every crap, coverless magazine in the place and longed for a smoke. At length, a grunting issued forth from the staircase along with the sound of rustling nylon and heavy clumping footfalls. Barbara, my dentist, appeared with a pie in one hand and a coffee in the other the first time I saw her, and heavy makeup. She reeked of the kind of fag smoke I wished I reeked of. She disapproved of my state of dental health right from the get-go, you could tell. She huffed and shrugged and threw down her tiny mirror repeatedly. Acting with the aid of a local translator (I shit you not) she asked what my dental past was etc and shook her head silently, almost sobbing as I recounted my tale of international neglect. Finally she stormed out of the room and I was told after a ten minute wait followed by an exploratory trip outside by our translator cum vacuum operator, that our audience was over. I called repeatedly to try and get my next appointment but was unlucky for the first month. This was pretty much the end for Barbara and me. I suspect she may have been turning to the bottle for comfort whilst adjusting to the pressures of living in this new, damp world of bottomless dental decay.
Here in New Zealand I dared not go to a dentist. when I first came to see Liz, she generously took me to her dentist up the road to take care of my immediate and most painful problems. It was quality work and had I not happened to see the invoice later, may have been perfectly happy. As soon as I realized how much it would cost me, the pain diminished noticeably and there it stayed for some time. Finally working on a film job again and earning heavily, I went to a dentist in Wellington to start about getting my upper Eastside renovated. She took a ten second look and told me there was nothing for it – three teeth needed to be pulled that day, pretty much, and their replacement titanium-pinned, made in Germany replacements would cost 7 to 8 THOUSAND. EACH. I bid her a curt good morning and paid her the 4 hundred dollars or whatever she wanted to tell me this catastrophic news. I was earning but 24k was a lot of dough to me. I then found Colleen Woo in central Wellington – a cheerful, extremely short dentist. She started to give me the Johnson feeling again – she calmed me after my recent 24k quote and said only one needed to be removed, the other two could be saved. I was rapt. She hauled out the offender and started in on the other two then…she got pregnant. She immediately quit work.
And there, pretty much, it sits. I’m now in daily pain, dull though it be. And a certain itch, a certain bad taste in my mouth when I suck my teeth tells me that things are not all well. It’s no wonder – I’ve got about 3 temporary fillings – one I’m sure from the Barbara era, two from Colleen – and half-done root canals from hither and yon. If I won the Lotto and if it was enough, I would get my teeth sorted up, man. That’s my dream. To be the man I was in Dr Johnson’s care. To get a cheerful “nothing to be done” as I exit from my next 6 monthly checkup and feel that warm, taken-care-of feeling once again.
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Tomorrow morning, thanks to some wonderful people we know, we are driving north to a little paradise called Rangiputa to stay in a gorgeous little batch for, uh, as long as we want to?!! Sure, it’s late winter. Sure it’s been pissing down for weeks. Sure we’re cabin feverish and unemployed. Northland, that far north, is a haunted and spiritual place and I cannot wait to explore it, I’ve longed to since the first time I went to Elliot Bay camping with TSO and her group of friends. I find it only gets more and more ‘real’ feeling the further north you go, in New Zealand although I can’t really qualify what I mean, precisely, by that. You need to feel it.
