Every three or four months, I visit a periodontist for some maintenance.
For what seems to me to be about an hour, one of these sadists will scrape, prod, push, scrape, scrape, prod, push and scrape about in my cakehole with their David Cronenberg inspired instruments of oral torture until my toes threaten to dislocate themselves from my feet and my spine contorts and arches in a fashion that would be quite impressive if I were a trapeze artist with Circus Oz.
And when this treatment is ended, I stagger, sweat soaked, from Ms. Mengele’s horizontal chair of terror to the front desk of this little shop of horrors to pay my debt, to pay what I owe for the privilege of having suffered so.
“That will be $200.00 today, Mr. Sharp”.
“Eftpos out of cheque, thanks”, I reply as I hand over my card, and then I glance at the time and realise that I have not been there for much longer than twenty minutes.
That’s ten bucks a minute.
Fuck me dead, he thinks to himself in quiet awe and dazed amazement.
A couple years ago, I went to a dentist who informed me that he needed to do a little work on a tooth.
“When did you have the root canal work on this done?” he inquired.
“Four, five years ago”, I replied.
“They didn’t do a particularly good job”, he said, “We’ll need to fix this up”.
“That ‘not particularly good job’ cost me a thousand bucks” I said.
“Yes, root canal isn’t cheap”, he replied with a nice smile, whilst I fought back the impulse to slap him upside his grinning head for stating the very fucking obvious.
And then he stuck me with some anaesthetic and proceeded to drill and file, drill and file, stuff some shit in the tooth and drill and file some more, after which I staggered from his very tastefully decorated little chamber of pain to the front desk to pay my debt, to pay the debt I owed for having been drilled and filed so.
“That will be $853.00 today, Mr. Sharp”.
“I see. I guess that will have to be credit today, thanks”, I replied, as I handed over my Mastercard, bidding farewell for now to my desire for a few new sticks of furniture for the flat.
“And did everything go well today, Mr. Sharp?”
“One fucking tooth has just cost me in the vicinity of two fucking grand, you braindead fucking bint, and the mood I’m in right now, I could stab you through the fucking forehead with a pair of fucking scissors, understand?” I replied.
…
…
No, I didn’t. I didn’t say that.
Instead, I said something like, “Yes. Fine, thank you”, and wobbled off into the street to make my way back to work.
I had a toothache just recently that put me in the mood to kill a blind man’s guide dog.
I wouldn’t kill a blind man’s guide dog, but you know what I mean.
It’s gone away for now, but I suspect it will return, and, once more, I shall have to toddle off to have Mr. Olivier have a poke at it and make me scream. And then I shall pay for it, and scream some more.
I’ve never quite been able to understand why those ailments that afflict us above our shoulders are deemed to be things that our national health care system should exclude.
Yes, yes, I do know that the Australian Dental Association lobbied vigorously for dental care to be excluded upon the initial introduction of Medicare, lest they be robbed of their inalienable birthright to fourteen Volvos and a Mediterranean-styled manse nestled midst the sweet, perfumed greenery of Baulkham Hills, complete with spas in all four bathrooms and a dedicated home theatre room where their private school educated kiddies, Chip and Donna-May, can retreat after a hard day’s backgammon tournament to relax with some gourmet cornchips and dip to watch the very latest in torture porn horror, I do realise this.
And they have lobbied vigorously for its exclusion ever since, and whenever such a concept like a national dental health care scheme is raised, up they pop to clatter their shiny white and perfect little choppers at the rest of us, telling us all how very, very ghastly such an idea is, and how “people who could now access dental care would continue to do so, and those who could not access care previously will be given second-class care”.
Which makes fuck all sense to me, to be perfectly frank.
I’ve had second-class dental health care from at least three dentists I can think of over the course of my life, but I’ve always paid first-class rates for it. One guy, I had to take out a loan to pay for the work he did, and then another guy looked at the work that guy had done, and said, “That work could’ve been done a whole lot better, would you like to have me do it again?” and, as sure as there’s shit on the sheets in a nursing home, up came that whole wanting to kill a blind man’s guide dog thing again.
The Australian Greens have a policy for dental health care to be bought under the umbrella of Medicare, but they don’t seem to talk about it much. Or if they do, the media don’t pay much attention to it. Which wouldn’t be terribly surprising, I suppose, given that most of the Australian mainstream media think the Greens are a bunch of evil, human-hating Nazis who’d like us all to live under environmentally friendly lean-to’s in a paddock somewhere and send our old folks off to death camps the minute they forget where they put the keys to the car.
Most of the mainstream Australian media is controlled by this old bloke who lives in the United States and goes by the name of Rupert, did you know that?
Rupert would like to own some more of it, too. Poor old Rupert, he was desperate for his media empire to penetrate the Chinese market some time back and he put a lot of effort into it too, but all he seemed to get out of it for his troubles was a wife.
Silly old bugger.
…
I’m sorry, I do digress.
I’d like The Greens to talk up their policy on dental health care a little more, make it more of a priority, put a bit of work into it, get it out there and into people’s minds as something that needs to be done, something that makes a whole lot of very good sense. It seems to me it’s a good idea for a government to attend to the healthcare requirements of the populace over which they govern, whether it’s general healthcare, mental health or dental.
You see, the healthier a person is, the more able they are to work, and these days, our governments keep saying that they would like us to work for as long as we possibly can, up to about the time we’re ready to pop our clogs so they don’t have to pay anyone an aged pension, say to about 96 years old.
…
I’m not working until I’m 96 years old.
Get fucked.
But I’d much rather pay a little extra tax for something like a really good, really comprehensive healthcare scheme that covers all the necessities, the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle (what the fuck is a kaboodle?), than pay tax to a government who then go and pay some boofhead a wad of cash simply because they had a root and made a baby or they want to buy a fucking house.
Because that just shits me, that type of thing. It shits me to fucking tears.
That’s the type of stupid shit that’s almost enough to make a man want to go out and kill a blind man’s guide dog.
‘specially if he’s got a toothache.