I don’t like strangers in my mouth. It’s my area and the feeling of someone else cruising around in there is a little upsetting. I also don’t like people cruising around actually within my teeth. I feel that my teeth are also my private area and that it’s a little disgusting for someone to actually drill through the enamel, scoop out the pulp, dig down into the root and then yank out the nerve. They don’t even give you the nerve, they just throw it away. That’s my nerve. The whole thing is very distressing and is not dissimilar to the feeling of accidentally biting on metal foil. Such is the experience of having a root canal.

Fortunately, that was a long time ago. What I had now was an abscessed tooth. Meaning my old root canal was apparently done in England by an unqualified man with a wooden spoon, and now it had become infected. Lending the left side of my mouth a certain tennis ball quality, and necessitating 16 hours worth of specialist American dental surgery to clean up the quarantined zone.

In truth it did not hurt that much. The surgeon / cave explorer simply spent a week of my life foraging through long dead tooth, attacking nerves wherever there were any left. Occasionally he pushed through the tooth accidentally, up into the base of my skull, causing the requisite yelp - but most of the time it was just like someone pinching an artificial limb. Just a numb senseless horror. Like sex with a blow up doll. It felt dead and pointless. And accordingly, the experience became far worse that the root canal that had preceded it many years before. It was worse than all the juicy, bloody pulp and tears. It felt sad and pathetic. The tooth didn’t even have nerves to feel - it didn’t even know it was a tooth anymore.

Like most things in the world now it was on TV. In front of me. The surgeon arranging a camera so that I could actually watch what he was doing inside my mouth. And accordingly I was forced to confront the violation. Witness the stranger within my personal area. The cave explorer, cruising around my dead personal regions. The victim forced to watch the perpetrator. My sad, lonely dead tooth unable to put up a fight, unable to let me know that there was a perpetrator inside.

That tooth still sits up in my slowly receding gumline, just chilling away. It’s an empty shell now, flanked by vibrant, nerve-filled buddies. I still brush it, like dusting a corpse or waxing a long-derelict car. But we never talk anymore – not really talk. Without those remaining nerves, we have drifted apart, unable to communicate. It’s just a lodger now. An empty, soulless stranger in my mouth. An enamel gravestone, marking another pathetic, hollow victory for American dentistry.