All I Want for Christmas is an Emergency Dentist

Teeth: the ultimate design flaw

Advertisement for Colgate’s Ribbon Dental Cream. Motion Picture Magazine 1924. Anonymous. Public domain, Wikimedia commons.

THE COMEDIAN and broadcaster Pam Ayres once wrote a poem called Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth. Ayres’ verse style is light and amusing, but this particular poem drips with regret, and bemoans the agonies of poor oral health, the downward trajectory of which can never be reversed. Poor Pam.

I have always maintained that teeth are a design flaw, and should by now be a footnote in our evolution, like the female reproductive system, functioning appendixes and men who don’t do housework. I speak as someone who, unlike Pam Ayres, has always “looked after me teeth”, yet inevitably the passing years have taken their toll, given that these bizarre entities are predisposed to decay on contact with every substance entering their environment. I once jokingly asked a dentist whether, to avoid all further trouble, she might consider taking all my teeth out and replacing them with wooden ones. She didn’t find it funny. Perhaps she was wondering how she would put her kids through private school without my regular contributions.

Despite my efforts to maintain a sparkling set of pearly-whites, I spent Christmas Day 2023 dosed up to the eyeballs on painkillers whilst my right cheek ballooned, immolating my head in a radiating furnace of pain. I couldn’t wait to get to bed with an anti-inflammatory the size of a horse tablet, keening like a wolf while I waited for it to take effect, pacing around my bedroom clutching my face, counting the seconds until my dentist stopped enjoying himself and went back to work.

Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The moment my dental practice opened its doors I hurled myself at the duty dentist, who told me that an infection had penetrated a root canal. Four years previously, I had spent hundreds of pounds and six months of my life having that root canal cleaned, filled and crowned, after regular check-ups had failed to predict a violent infection. Now it had failed. The duty dentist shrugged. “It happens”, he said.