Last month, toothache forced me to the dentist.  Fixing the problem was agony (despite anaesthetic) so when the pain returned I opted for painkillers as long as I could.  Today I went back.

You may remember, last time my dentist trip was a cycle of screeching, swearing and giggling.  This time the he was prepared (this time he had people in the waiting room, and I guess screeching and swearing aren’t the sort of things you want the next patient to hear).  He injected me with local anaesthetic and it took aaaages.

‘Have you given me more than last time?’ I enquired

‘You said you didn’t want to feel anything’ he replied.  ‘You won’t now’.

He was true to his word.  Within 10 minutes I couldn’t feel 70% of my face. I closed my eyes to go to a happy place as he brandished the drill, and realised that I couldn’t close my left eye.  I manually shut it and let him get on, unable to feel a thing.

Now, all would have been ok if that was the end of it.  Yes, the receptionist laughed at me when I attempted to talk to her, but I did look like Popeye as I could only control the far right of my mouth, so it was kind of fair.  However, I was a bit worried about the fact that I was having to manually blink my left eye so in a fit of being sensible, I thought I should let the worse wear off before I drove home.  I went to Tesco.

While selecting a tomato (just the one, Norman isn’t keen) I heard someone behind me singing a happy sort of tune.  I like it when people do that sort of thing, so I turned around to smile at, what turned out to be a rather good looking man.  I smiled.  Only I couldn’t.  I sort of leered at him instead.  And then blinked.  Only I couldn’t do that either because my stupid eyes still weren’t working together.  So I kind of winked.  He did a double take, stopped singing and disappeared.  Embarrassed, I decided to wrap my scarf around the bottom part of my face to stop any further accidental leerings.  And that’s when I discovered that my nose was running but my general numbness had stopped me feeling it.  Leering, winking, and with snot down my face.  It’s no great surprise that I’m single really….

If this round of treatment hasn’t sorted my tooth I think I will plead for a general anaesthetic before the dentist does anything else.  That way at least I wouldn’t scare any more of the population of Bumpkinstown :o)

It’s prettier than my teeth.