Many years ago my friend – a woman who has given birth to a human infant – told me that bringing her firstborn into the world was almost the worst pain of her life. It was pipped to the post only by one other terrible experience: toothache. I should make it clear that it was I who asked for this ranking, all the better to gauge how correct my own dental pain was. Mildly mollified by her answer, I curled back into a foetal ball and continued to moan aloud from the pain of my infected wisdom tooth.
I spent most of last weekend in the same position, hyperaware of every single component of my mouth, as I tried to escape this plane of existence to a place with no teeth, no infection, no pain. I cry at everything (as previously explored on this page) but have an unsettlingly high pain threshold. Even so, I have been humbled by this pain. The prescribed painkillers barely touch the sides of the discomfort, which has me by the scruff of the neck. In its grip I am weak and whimpering, waking at 3am, mewl-crying from the sheer ache. In the bathroom mirror I look into my wet eyes and see a spectre: a dancing tooth taunting me. Delirious and drooling, I have a clear 90s horror movie thought: the call is coming from inside the house. The body turns against us all, eventually.
Ovid wrote: dolor hic tibi proderit olim. Someday this pain will be useful to you. It doesn’t apply here. There can be no larger narrative woven into this pain. It’s just draining and horrible. I impatiently await the day I can march into the surgeon’s chair and demand an extraction. In the meantime, a modest proposal: let’s ban all teeth.
