Robert Hampton

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30th August 2014

Jaw! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
Posted by at 10.23pm | It's My Life | 2 responses

“Yeah, you need to go back to the hospital.”

I didn’t like the casual way the dentist said this. I also didn’t like that I had barely taken my coat off and plonked myself in his chair before he said it.

The story so far: I had a wisdom tooth removed a couple of weeks ago. Then it became infected. A week on from a feverish emergency dentist appointment, I had been lulled into thinking all was well and had even gone back to work on Wednesday. The next day, I was scheduled to see the same dentist, and assumed that he was going to give me the all clear.

Oh sure, I was still all swollen up, and there was still a certain stiffness in the jaw which left it unable to open wider than a centimetre. This meant a continued diet of soup and porridge. Well, it was either that or post slices of Tesco Value wafer-thin ham through the narrow gap.

I had hoped that this was all just a side effect of the surgery and it would clear up on its own, even if it was a little slower than usual. But when the dentist gave the bad news, deep down it didn’t come as much of a surprise.

I went straight home and phoned up the clinic where I originally had the operation done. After a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing on the phone (not helped by my not being able to remember my surgeon’s name) they said that they could maybe offer me an appointment next week sometime, and they would call me back.

Screw that.

So on Thursday afternoon I marched into the A&E department of Fazakerley Hospital. A super-duper new A&E is being built there at the moment, but I had to contend with the older, slightly run-down building. It felt slightly cramped (probably because of the amount of people waiting) and there was a Coca-Cola vending machine with a partially peeled off sticker by the coin slot, proudly declaring that it was “New 5p and 10p ready!”

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16th August 2014

The Whole Tooth and Nothing but the Tooth
Posted by at 8.01pm | It's My Life | 3 responses

Operation

Yesterday I was admitted to hospital.

Don’t panic, though! This was not the result of some disaster, a faux pas with a chainsaw normally seen in the opening scenes of Casualty. Rather, it was to have two wisdom teeth extracted.

I’d been referred by my dentist, who had spotted that the position they’d grown into was causing food to get trapped between them and the healthy teeth next door. This was handy if I got hungry later in the evening, as I could usually extract a bit of gristle that had got stuck there, but not so good for oral hygiene, as I was starting to develop cavities in the adjacent tooth.

(Incidentally, if God really does exist and created all of us in his image, surely he would have got the whole teeth thing down correctly by now? I know so many people who have had to have wisdom teeth removed because they are growing sideways, or pushing other teeth out of the way, or some other problem)

Like a massive coward, I had opted to have it done under general anaesthetic. I didn’t have to, but as soon as the consultant at the pre-op mentioned that they would be cutting bits of bone out of my face, I decided that I wanted to be asleep for the whole thing.

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