The search for Mr Burns

20 Mar 2007

When I was very young, my heart stopped twice. I'm lucky to be alive. I had a brain scan afterwards to check everything was ok. The scan-man told my mother, to her delight, that I had in fact registered an abnormally high level of brain activity. My mum was obviously rather pleased to hear this. He's going to be a genius, she thought. I'm sure. Unfortunately, nearly 30 years on, I've seen no hard evidence of any benefit. If anything, it seems to be a curse. I'm restless and get bored very easily. I've never had a formal IQ test, but the Fisher Price one in Uncle Pete's Psychology A Level class told me I'd be lucky to get about 110, which means I'm not a genius by any stretch. Worse still, I have an over-active imagination. I always think of every possible outcome to everything and usually focus, unwillingly on the worst. It was with sheer, abject terror, then, that I sat back down in the dentist's chair – something that now feels so familiar, I think it's moulded to match the contours of my back. I gazed up at the Simpsons poster on the ceiling again, knowing full well that it wasn't going to distract me for long as I only had one character that I knew left to look for. And there he was, grinning at me from the corner of the poster. Monty Burns. Before I'd even opened my mouth. So there I am, knowing that the whole sorry show was going to last at least an hour, and I had nothing to concentrate on but the tools. Don't get me wrong, I couldn't hope for a nicer dentist. The problem was that when he would use a new tool, be it needle or drill, he would raise it to his eye level – approximately three inches away from my own eyes so I could see the finer details of the serated edges of the drill. None of it actually hurt. The only pain I've felt (so far, please god, the anaesthetic hasn't properly worn off) was the first needle numbing my mouth. However, it was the commentary that I loved the most. "This is just a small drill, you'll hear a tiny buzzing and your mouth will vibrate a little." "This is a bigger drill, the noise will be a bit worse…" And so on. When you tell people you're going to have a root canal, they look at you with the face they save for reactions to really bad news. I've just had my second, and the fact is, it doesn't hurt. I can feel a dull throbbing that I know will pass soon. The real pain is in the mind. Psychological trauma. What if the drill slipped? Would he catch it before it ripped out the inner wall of my lips, or will it just leave a slight gash? What if the needle goes right through my mouth and out the other side? Why the hell are both the dentist and the dentist's assistant wearing the same masks that Pneumatic drill operators wear? The 'funniest' bit was when he told me that he'd just put some pins in my mouth and had to sear them away with a torch. A torch. For real. You won't feel a thing, he said, that burning session is the pins. Now just hold your breath for ten seconds…