A life in letters: Dentists

The first dental surgery I attended as a child was in a Victorian house somewhere down Glasgow’s Crow Road. Of dentist and surgery I remember nothing. I do recall the tall-ceilinged waiting room, and the wooden puzzles thoughtfully placed on tables to distract clients from the ordeal to come.

I must have attended over a dozen dental surgeries in various towns in the course of the years – plus the Glasgow Dental Hospital in which I had a tooth extracted before I was 10. What I recall about that adventure was not so much the pain, as my outrage at being called by the receptionist, misled no doubt by someone’s challenging handwriting, as ‘Joan Dempster.’

The Happy Smile Club team came to Carluke Primary School when I was about 11, parking their colourful van in the playground, and encouraging us to join the Club.  The sole criterion for membership was a commitment to brush regularly. ‘Up and down! That way, the food particles are removed. You’ll never get your teeth really clean if you brush round and round!’

My dentist in Carluke, a Mr Brown, had a surgery overlooking the traffic lights at the cross, above the licensed grocer and on the same landing as the Carluke Gazette office. He still used a slow drill, driven by an electric motor and a cord belt, which ground away remorselessly at the offending teeth, making your whole jaw vibrate.

I don’t think I was ever offered an injection, but perhaps I was and refused. If so, I was foolish – a needle would have been the lesser evil compared with the frequent moments of wincing pain when it felt as if the drill had skidded onto a nerve. I would dig my nails into the skin on my lower arm to distract myself from the pain, holding myself rigid. Nerves and a low pain threshold – I could not have been an easy patient.

Today my excellent dentist at NHS Abban Street surgery in Inverness prides himself on delivering what comes close to being pain-free dentistry.

My first adult tooth was removed when I was a teenager, attending Mr Archibald in Wishaw who had what seemed sophisticated, water-cooled drilling equipment. He began by attempting to fill the tooth in question, concluded it was beyond repair, and decided to remove it there and then. He gave me a further injection, and began what seemed to me to be a rather frantic, panicked struggle with the recalcitrant molar. Eventually, as his assistant clung to my head, restraining it from moving forward, the roots gave way with a tortured, wrenching sound, and my mouth filled with a foul-smelling taste of decay.

I returned to school in wounded hero mode, rather pleased with the way in which I had handled this trauma. Forever after, the page of my copy of Approach to Latin, which we were studying that afternoon, bore spots of blood.

Up until the 1980s, I used NHS dentists, including the redoubtable Christy May in Lanark. But by then NHS dentists were in short supply, and I was paying a monthly fee to Denplan to guarantee standard dental treatment at a private practice at no additional cost.

When I came north to Inverness in 1992, in the tradition of good consumer research I wrote to a number of local dentists, asking them to persuade me that I should sign up to their practice. Unfortunately, the dentist who responded most convincingly turned out to have a rather lax attitude to time-keeping. You’d be sitting in the waiting room at 9.05am awaiting your 9.00am appointment when the dentist would appear, hot and sweaty having cycled in from home. You then had to wait until he had showered before he saw you.

A pity I had to move on, because his hygienist had a most inspiring view from her window over the rooftops of Inverness, the Moray Firth, the Kessock Bridge, wheeling seagulls.

I didn’t stay long at my next dentist either. By this time the folk at Denplan, concerned that there seemed to be more amalgam in my mouth than tooth, decided to charge me £20 a month which was a lot of money in 1994 when you had a young family.

It was at the surgery in Quarry Street, Hamilton that I first became aware of the hygienist phenomenon.

Before then, your dentist had polished your teeth from time to time, and perhaps given the odd piece of advice. And that was that.  But I was cornered by the hygienist at the Hamilton practice, who sat me down, stood large boards illustrating healthy and disgustingly unhealthy teeth and gums on the floor in front of me, and proceeded to lecture me, rather condescendingly I thought, on dental hygiene. It was a challenge to be humble and teachable – the poor girl was only doing her job.

I admit hygienists are helpful. Scaling I can see the benefit of. Polishing with that delightfully-flavoured pink toothpaste I positively relish. But lectures on gums and flossing and mouthwash are a bit wearing, and I am not as obedient as I should be.

And it seems that up-and-down brushing is now bad! ‘It damages the gums! Small, circular movements of the brush. That’s what you need!’

‘But they told me that wouldn’t really remove the food.’

‘That must have been a long time ago!’

‘Yes, Happy Smile Club, 1963.’