Dental & Doctor’s visits -- What a pain


Now being disabled and wheelchair bound brings its own challenges but my latest visit to my dentist and my doctor proved to be a work of transportation and manoeuvring par excellence. Firstly let me explain that for the past year all transferring from wheelchair to toilet or bed has been carried out with the aid of a mobile hoist. As a result of my last fall I haven’t walked for a year.

Now, the doctor’s visit was the easiest as we arranged for him to carry out his investigation into my state of health at my home. So I was duly hoisted onto my bed for the inspection. Blood pressure, ears, nose and throat were all inspected and found to be in working order.  This was done with the doctor and my wife scrambling all over me and the bed to get access to the selected orifice.
Next, came the prostate inspection which made my eyes pop out on stalks. You can ask any man about this inspection and I am sure that you will hear some horrific stories. Suffice to say that my doctor has a finger like a thick German sausage which was suddenly and unexpectedly inserted to do the feel test on the gland. Thus the eyes on stalks quip. Then to fill a little bottle for a urine sample ------ a work of art when your arms and hands don’t work all that well. Lastly a series of vials of blood were drawn after the nurse had searched for a vein in both of my arms and eventually resorted to draining a good portion of my life’s fluid from my hand.

A few days later I had to pay a visit to a dentist because one of my upper molars had worked itself loose and was causing considerable pain.
After spending hours on the internet fruitlessly searching for a dentist specializing in treatment of disabled patients I conceded defeat and selected a dentist from the yellow pages, whose receptionist assured my wife that they had plenty of experience with wheelchair bound patients. The dentist is on the third floor with only one elevator and a flight of steps for access. (I shudder to think what pain and suffering I would have had to endure if the lift had broken or if there was a power failure)
After negotiating narrow passages I got to the door of the surgery to find that there was a building supporting pillar or column situated right outside (opposite) the entrance door, thus cutting the passage in half. After much performance going back and forth I managed to get into the surgery. Then I faced “THE CHAIR”.

Access to the side of the chair was limited so it was decided that the dentist and his assistant would pick me up and physically transfer me to the dentist’s chair. No mean feat seeing that I weigh around 85kg. Puffing and grunting from all three of us interspersed with squeals of concern from my wife became the order of the day while they manoeuvred in all directions to get me comfortable.

He looked, felt and decided to extract, between sucking in great gulps of air. His assistant was equally distraught and while he also inhaled deeply he sounded rather like an asthmatic vacuum cleaner. It sounded something like hoooooooop peep, hooooooooop peep. It was all rather hilarious but it is difficult to laugh with dental paraphernalia protruding from your mouth. So my hawr, hawr added to the hooooooop peep and the dentists gasps we probably sounded like some heavy metal band at practise.

Injections followed, If they had used laughing gas, they ran the risk of me going into hysterics. We waited for the prescribed waiting period, before yanking the offending tooth from my jaw. Fortunately by this time we had all started breathing normally.

Then the huffing and puffing performance was repeated in reverse. I negotiated the problem doorway after another few back and forth movements, then into the lift praying all the way down that the thing wouldn’t breakdown and needless to say that after all this carrying, pushing and pulling, my body was rather sore. I am sure that once the dentist and his assistant had recovered they would have given instructions to the receptionist to be fully booked if I should ever phone for an appointment again.
I have these episodes written indelibly on my memory and unless I develop Alzheimer‘s I will suffer in silence rather than undergo more embarrassment and physical abuse.