Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Toothless in Glasgow

I broke a tooth the other day whilst eating cabbage. That will tell you how rotten the tooth was to start with.
Mrs. Lear informed me I would have to wait three months for an appointment with our unctious dentist, but undeterred I phoned and was slotted in this morning.
Why do dentists insist on talking to you when you can't reply? It would be good to be able to say even just " Shut up", when your mouth is full of cotton wool, local anaesthetic and sucking machines, but it's a touch incomprehensible - a bit like the extremely annoying Virgin ad with the talking dog on Classic FM at the moment.
Anyway, after much description of what he was going to do, he removed the stump and packed the resulting hole with gauze.
Total time: 17 minutes
Time talking: 16minutes and 25 seconds
Time for extraction: 7 seconds
Time for looking at extracted stump:12 seconds
Time for putting extracted tooth on sidetable:16 seconds
Time for raising chair to vertical again ( in silence): 10 seconds.
Total cost ( when the bill comes in) £147.50. What the 50p is for I have no idea.
Once hustled out the door onto the front steps, unable to speak, the next patient was already in the surgery, and another was ascending the steps towards me.
He took one look at my puffed-up cheek and twisted mouth, hesitated, blanched, turned round, and walked away.
At least I've done some good today.

2 comments:

Whispering Walls said...

Dentists are such a rip off and we all know how hard it is to get one on the NHS.

kinglear said...

NHS? What's that?