IT was like a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. I was standing wide-eyed, cornered by a man wearing a white coat and a mask, a nurse with a huge needle and a terribly bewildered friend all staring at me, all poised.
All I wanted to do was leg it, but I envisaged big, burly security guards standing outside the door, ready to link my arms and drag me back to the chair.

Obviously, this was not the case and I just looked stupid and hysterical (what an actress) and, after much embarrassment, my dentist persuaded me to rest back down. Last year, he my dentist discovered “a spot of decay” in my back right molar. I was horrified that my gnashers required their first land-fill as I prided myself on having filling-free pearly whites for almost 30 years.

I soon accepted my fall from grace when was soon accepted as I realised that if my filling was white I could, in theory, ignore it and resume my previous un-invaded status. In other words, lie about it. So, that was that, I would just sit back, fall asleep and wake with a bit of a dull ache. Yeah, right.

Shopping break

The appointment was after I had been shopping with my friend, Jo, so I brought her along and sat her down with a magazine (never pass up a lift home). And, thank God I did.  I sat back in the chair, waiting for the plastic mask and to count down from 10 (all the fun bits of going to the dentist) when a hideous needle appeared before my eyes. “Er, what's that?” I asked accusingly. “I'm just going to give you three little injections before we start,” came the reply.

“No, no, no, sorry there's been some mistake, I don't have injections, I have gas.” My dentist smiled at me pitifully, just as the lady in the post office did when my mum asked me, aged nine, to send a telegram.

“Ooh, we don't use gas any more dear, that went out with the dark ages. No, it's just injections now.”

Well, I was out of that chair before you could say psychiatric ward. Little did I know that during those years of chomping on sarsaparilla sticks and gloating at my lack of cavities, the filling process had evolved and gas was no longer offered to patients. My heart sank. “But why can't I have gas?” I pleaded. “Regulations, now I'm afraid,” I was told.

Begging

“But, what if I request it? You could get some in for me and I'll come back next week.”

“No can do. I'm sorry… would you like to sit down?”

Look at me, trying to cut a deal with my dentist. I gripped Jo's hand while I was injected, drilled and scraped. All three people coaxing me, stroking my head and telling me I was “doing really well” and “nearly there”. I wanted to throw up. My lips dried, my eyes watered and I just wanted to yell “my mouth doesn't open any wider!”

Piercing nerve pain shot up and down my jaw and I prayed for my ordeal to be over. Once Jo had unlocked my fingers from around her hand I sat up. My mascara had run, my heart was racing and I felt grumpy and exceedingly sorry for myself. The rest of the day she kept asking me questions and laughed at her rubber-lipped psychotic friend as she 'thried thoo thpeak'.

Over and done with

As with most of the stressful situations I endure, they pass and are laughed about and I assured myself it will be a one off – until last week. Yep, another “spot of decay”. I psyched myself up for more agony and promised myself not to make a scene. Then I called a few friends to check their availability for hand- holding, but to no avail. Instead , they shared their experiences with me.

When one friend was a little girl, her mum dropped her off at the dentist while she parked the car, and it was only when her mum arrived the dentist realised they had extracted five teeth from the wrong child! How utterly traumatic.

I heard other tales of injections accidentally hitting nerve endings, root canal disasters; it was quite enough. With all these horror stories, I was positive my next visit would be just as disastrous. As I headed up the surgery stairs, I gripped my St Christopher (I know he's the patron saint of travel, but he was all I had to hand) and I prayed for a divine intervention.

“Right,” began my dentist. “I've been looking at your X-rays and I'm not sure there is even a cavity there. Because of that, I'm not going to go ahead.”

I could have kissed him. I waltzed out of that surgery with a real spring in my step, determined to start afresh and floss, brush often, and keep my mouth sugar-free from now on. Yeah, like that's going to work when there's temptation in the form of jaffa cakes.

Still, I must admit, after all is said and done it is a painful experience but I'm not sure which is worse – getting the filling or getting the bill.