Down in the mouth but saved in my aching hour of need

By Derek Lord

Published:

I WOULD like to join with the woman who wrote to this newspaper earlier in the week, praising the NHS 24 helpline. I had cause to use this service for the first time last Saturday having woken up in the wee small hours in agony from a dental abscess.

Why is it these things always happen to us at the weekend when the majority of the nation’s dentists are belting a wee white ball round a field or flying off to Acapulco for a few days’ R&R?

This wasn’t the case with my own dentist, I must admit, but it might just as well have been. When I phoned his house about 9am, having spent seven hours roaming the floors of my own abode in excruciating pain, his wife informed me that he was away. She commiserated with my predicament and suggested that I try the dental hospital in Glasgow.

I did as she advised, but all I got was a recorded announcement telling me to try the aforementioned NHS 24 service. On doing so, I was answered by a very considerate woman who listened sympathetically to my tale of woe before connecting me with an equally-caring young woman who specialised in problems of a dental nature.

She spent a considerable amount of time telling me what over-the-counter painkillers I could take to alleviate the pain. I was amazed at the quantities she suggested I should dose myself with. It was all rather academic, however, since I had already taken the one and only paracetamol tablet I could find in the house.

Herself suffers from a perpetual headache and eats them like sweeties, so I was lucky to find one that she had missed.

If I had had the amounts that the nice young woman on the phone recommended I take, I would probably have been numb from head to foot for the next six weeks, but I didn’t want to seem ungrateful for her advice so I said nothing.

When she had finished on the subject of the painkillers, she informed me that, since the abscess was extremely swollen, she would phone me back with the name of the nearest hospital that was operating an emergency dental unit that day.

That was the good news. The bad news came half-an-hour later when she rang to inform me that I had a choice of two hospitals – one 31 miles away and another one five miles farther than the first.

Now, I do not live in some remote corner of Scotland. In fact, I live in one of the most densely-populated areas in the central belt. There must be several hundred dentists within a 10-mile radius of my house, not to mention half-a-dozen hospitals, yet I was faced with a 60-mile round trip if I wanted to get some relief from my exploding gums.

Thankfully, I have a car. Without one I would have had to take two buses and a train to reach the nearest of the hospitals she had suggested.

Herself became very agitated when I told her I intended driving to the hospital.

“You can’t drive in your condition,” she cried. “What happens if you pass out at the wheel?”

I told her I had an abscess on my gum and was not suffering from sleeping sickness, but she would not be swayed. She wanted to know how I knew it was an abscess.

“You probably pricked your gum with the toothbrush and it has become infected,” she argued.

“I looked it up on the internet while you were sleeping,” I replied.

She tried another tack: “Oh, you’re always the same. You can’t take any sort of pain.”

I thought that this was rich coming from someone who bursts into tears every time she as much as stubs her toe, but I didn’t say as much. After more than 30 years of marriage, I know when I’m on a losing wicket.

Instead, I promised to drive with extreme care and to pull over if I felt the slightest bit faint, and off I went on my odyssey.

I had only a vague idea of how to get to the hospital. When I got to within 10 miles of where I thought it was, a signpost instructed me to follow the signs marked with a large “H”. Unfortunately, at the next junction, there was no such sign and, a few miles later, I found myself in a sleepy hamlet knocking on doors until I found a house that was occupied.

The woman of the house was kind enough to put me back on the right track and eventually I arrived at my destination. I parked the car and made for the hospital’s main entrance, where I pushed through a throng of dressing-gown-clad smokers before reaching the receptionist’s desk. Of course, since it was lunchtime by then, there was no receptionist in sight. In fact, far from being the hive of frenetic activity we have come to expect from watching the likes of Casualty and Holby City, this hospital seemed to be almost deserted.

After 20 minutes standing at the empty desk, I spotted a pitiful group of out-patients huddled in a partially-walled-off corner of the lobby. One of them informed me that they were all waiting for emergency dental treatment. Some of them had been waiting for nearly three hours because the dentist hadn’t bothered to turn up and a replacement had to be found. My heart sank, but I needn’t have worried. An hour-and-a-half later, a very pretty, personable young woman was drilling away merrily at my molar while discussing her Saturday-night plans with her equally pretty colleagues.

She had skimped a bit on the novocaine with the result that I went through an ordeal just short of Dustin Hoffman’s treatment at the hands of Laurence Olivier in the movie Marathon Man, but it was all worth it in the end.

She did tell me to raise my left hand if I was feeling any discomfort (that’s dentist speak for unbearable pain), but I did my best to quell my urge to scream out loud every time her drill tore into my nerve ends. Bless her, she was doing her best and I didn’t want her going off on her night out in the knowledge that she had aged me five years in as many minutes.

And bless the NHS for coming to my aid in my hour of need.