Roots

I had two roots taken out at the start of this week. I'm not good in a dentist's chair. I struggle to relax fully, and when I do, I often find the world starting to swim before me. I need a little tension to keep me alive, it seems.

Root treatment is so easy now, one jab, a little drilling, and then the process of dragging out the unwanted contents of the tooth. The trouble is, for me, my over-active imagination. I have some of those little twisty drills the dentist uses for clearing the root, I know what they look like, and how they work, and I can't help wandering slighly out of my head and into the space above my tongue to watch the process.

The other trouble, more for doctors and dentists than for me, is that I have a slight history of vagus nerve reactions. If I suffer too sharp a nervous pain, I black out. It is some sort of survival mechanism; the brain and body jointly decide that they are better off waiting until the pain has stopped, and shut down. To an outsider, I appear to be dead.

The first I knew of this tendency of mine was when I had some jabs before going overseas. One particular jab started a strange sizzling in my ears. The noise grew rapidly, and I became fascinated by it. Then, some time later, I realised I was lying on the floor, and the receptionist was trying to reassure the doctor, who was a locum on his first day in the village practice. He asked me, rather shakily, if I felt better.

"Yes," I answered, listening to the strange insistent sizzle reasserting itself, "but I think it's happening again". And it did. I woke up shortly afterwards, feeling cold, but rather invigorated.

The next time I went out , a year or so later, was purely my fault. I had sat down to breakfast at the hotel after finishing a night shift, and stretched my left arm. Something clicked at the base of my neck and the pain became intense. The sizzling noise built up, the pain went away, and sometime later, I found myself lying on the floor under the breakfast table in the recovery position, with the waitress stroking my cheek. The chef was relieved to see I hadn't touched my food.

I frightened a dentist a few months later, with a dramatic faint in the chair after he began drilling without waiting for the injection to take hold. He refused to treat me again until I had seen a doctor, so I registered with a local GP and explained the problem to him.

"When you black out, do you piss yourself?" was his only question.
"No, will it help if I do?"

He looked at me in exasperation, put me down as "suffering from fainting fits", and suggested I go to a different dentist.

I had my revenge on the medical profession with my last blackout, in the treatment room of Southhampton hospital A&E, where I had been taken after ripping a fingernail loose from my finger in a removal accident. As the doctor began to try and stitch it back into place without bothering with a local, I warned him that I had a tendency to vagus nerve attacks. He nodded as if he understood, and carried on sewing. The sizzle came quickly.

When I woke up, the nurse was trying to comfort the doctor, who was white and shaking like a leaf. "Look," she was saying, "he's awake, he's moving".

"You could have warned us," he said grimly, as he watched the nurse give me an injection. What more could I have said? Vagus nerve attack means short spell of death-like coma? Was he really a doctor, or just an Eastern-bloc trainee on work-experience? Thank God for the receptionists in the surgeries and the nurse; at least they all knew what to do. Just leave him alone, and he'll come home.

I haven't had any more attacks since I stopped doing long night shifts, fatigue must have played a part in my reactions. But last year, when the toothache started, I went to see the dentist, and as I sat in the chair, felt the tension in my arms and neck, and knew that if I went through the treatment, I was going to have another trip away. The stress of the long journeys and life away from home had worn me down again. I put up with the mild pain for the few remaining weeks of the contract, stroking the web of skin between thumb and forefinger to cope with any twinges.

The two enduring memories I have of the attacks are the mesmerising quality of the sizzling sound, and the feeling of absolute cold when I first wake up again. And in between those two, nothing. No out-of-body experiences, no visions of lights or angels or spirits on the astral plane. Just nothing. Ever so peaceful.

And, for my friend who's waiting for her appointment later in this week, I wish you a painless session.