Extraction

The tooth with the abcess has finally been removed - thank god for that. Debrah is fast asleep recovering from the trauma and the sedation drugs and I'm just recovering from a stressful and tiring afternoon and an unexpectedly close-up view of a tooth extraction.

In the end it all happened very suddenly after a frustrating week of trying to resolve the problem and a week of continued pain for Debrah.

I landed back in the UK on Monday afternoon and went directly to Debrah's office and from there directly to a swish (in fact, Swiss) dental clinic in the heart of the West End. The dentist was excellent and all the staff very friendly and understanding of Debrah's fear and her pain and after a couple of x-rays and a bit of "Can I look in your mouth?, No you can't" fencing between Debrah and the dentist we left with an estimate for £3,500 (better than the £7,000 we had been quoted by one private dentist) and a promise of an appointment as soon as possible.

If Debrah hadn't needed treatment under sedation the work could have been done there and then but because sedation was absolutely necessary we had to wait until an anaesthetist was available - a real catch-22 situation - the ridiculousness of which was confirmed when we were told that the first available date for an appointment was 10th December, nearly a whole month away.

Clearly there was no way Debrah could cope with the pain for another month, so we went back to square one, typed 'emergency dental treatment london' into google and started phoning around. I tried to get in touch with the dental hospitals, where I figured that sedation would be readily available, but got lost in a maze of telephone answering systems and many other clinics could do immediate emergency treatment but didn't provide sedation.

Finally I found a small clinic in Camden that had availability the next day and at a cost that made the other quotes look like outrageous profiteering, which no doubt there is in this line of business at the moment. They gave me an appointment at 2.30 - I was so relieved that I didn't even spot how ironic that time was!

It all suddenly seemed too good to be true and I read every page of their website just to make sure we weren't going to end up in someone's kitchen with a bottle of whisky and a pair of pliers - but the reality was it was a small one dentist clinic with non of the glitz and overheads of the big West End ones.

The conscious sedation was interesting stuff - Debrah had a completely hallucinogenic time and said some bizarre things such as "Why are they putting scorpions in my mouth?" and "What did the dog do?" before later on trying to bite the dentist. It went well until the final root wouldn't come out and the sedation started to wear off but we got there eventually and, thankfully, Debrah doesn't remember too much about it.

There is more work to be done and the broken tooth is still there but for now, I hope, once the hole heals up and the bruising settles down, the pain will have gone.