A Visit to the Dentist

Last week I visited my dentist for my periodic dental check-up and came away, much to my surprise, quite elated. Dental check-ups are not an activity that I can claim to be able to take in my stride and my attendances at dental check-ups tend not be nearly as frequent as they ought to be. Received wisdom about the frequency of dental check-ups has equivocated over the years, - sometimes declaring six-monthly check-ups to be essential for good dental care and other times conceding that check-ups might be undertaken at longer interval such as a year, for example, without serious detriment to one's long-term dental health. This division of opinion as to whether six monthly or yearly check-ups are the more beneficial has been a welcome gift to a phobic like me whose fear of dental check-ups is incurable. With blatant opportunism, I have seized on the apparent rift in expert opinion, to allow myself to conclude that my own check-ups could be made at an even more extended interval of fifteen months instead of twelve months. I haven't of course taken care to appraise my dentist of this unilateral decision of mine to institute fifteen monthly check-ups. Consequently, at regular intervals of about six months or so, his practice continues to send me polite communications reminding me of the imminence of my dental check-up and inviting me to attend at my earliest convenience. I steadfastly ignore the first several of these entreaties in pursuit of my own agenda of fifteen monthly check-ups, although I am aware that this practice might well lead even some close friends to shake their heads and conclude wearily that this is simply procrastination on my part, designed to disguise a phobia of dental treatment. I choose on the other hand to characterise it, perhaps rather grandly, as my iron determination to adhere unflinchingly to my aim of extending the intervals between dental check-ups. Unsurprisingly therefore, when the usual series of reminders arrived in the post just prior to my last check-up, I carefully ignored the first several, until deciding in due course that it was at last timely to make an actual appointment with the dentist. As usual, on the day of the appointment, I was assailed, almost from the moment that I woke up, by a feeling of foreboding, which precedes all my encounters with the dentist. On my way up to the surgery I even tried to invoke the power of prayer to ensure an easy passage through the ordeal that I imagined awaited me. But the efficacy of prayer seldom offers much hope to frayed nerves, and I arrived at the surgery in a state of despondency and somewhat disappointed that prayers had proved so futile in my particular case. Mercifully, I didn't have to wait long before the nurse came out to escort me into the dentist's presence. My dentist greeted me cheerfully as usual. He is the personification of charm and good manners, and when it comes to examining teeth, he happens to have the gentlest touch that I have encountered amongst dentists - and I have been under the care of several over the years, including one who easily qualified as the "Butcher of Walthamstow". As I reclined in the dentist's chair and closed my eyes, as is my wont when undergoing dental examination, I could feel the dentist carefully probing my teeth and uttering the ritual intonations that dentists resort to during dental check-ups: upper right four, upper right five, upper right six missing, etc. They made little sense to me but I apprehended that they might possibly be a damning verdict on the state of my teeth. After what appeared an eternity, which in reality was no more than five minutes, the dentist stepped back and with a most pleasant smile announced that everything seemed to be alright, and that he didn't think we needed to anything to them, - meaning my teeth -, 'this time'. It took a moment or two before the import of his words sank in. If there were such an emotion as 'stunned happiness' then I had just experienced it and I was having some difficulty containing my joy. I should have remained calm and thanked the dentist politely but I did no such thing, and probably to my dentist's horror, disgraced myself by bestowing on him an undignified profusion of thanks, accompanied by several incoherent expressions of gratitude. The dental nurse, possibly mistaking my emotion for distress, came to my aid and escorted me out to the receptionist, to complete the formalities of form-filling and charge-payment. I left the surgery in a state that some dental surgeons might describe as 'post check-up' euphoria. Its effect was to cram my head with all kinds of joyful thoughts and as the euphoria subsided, the realisation gradually dawned on me that the most exhilarating moments in life were not necessarily engendered by extraordinary events such as one's rare achievements or even rarer strokes of good fortune but quite often by the ordinary and mundane things in life such as a visit to the dentist.