Joanne McNeill: Teeth and murder most foul

Joanne McNeill talks about her trip to the dentist.

All of my teeth were ripped untimely from my head recently.

Of course, I exaggerate. I wanted the dentist to take the lot but he refused because the remaining six were perfectly healthy.

Clearly, there were no such scruples in the past when total tooth extraction and dentures were popular 21st birthday presents. It sounds gruesome now when extreme measures are taken to save natural teeth even unto the grave. Mind you, it could have saved years of pain and trouble in my case. Certainly, it seems an awful waste to spend fortunes on teeth immediately prior to death because, as far as I know, mastication and smiling for the camera are not necessary post mortem.

Ripped is not true either. They were pulled under local anaesthetic by a kind, public-spirited dentist. For one long excruciating time warp, we were one; his hands, my mouth, his gurgling belly, my ear, he reminding me to breathe and I conjuring my father's war story when, as a POW in Austria, he was taken to a doctor to have his wisdom teeth extricated, without anaesthetic.

Before operating, the doctor announced to collected local rubberneckers: "Now we shall see how brave the enemy is."

Dad didn't utter a peep. The first one hurt like hell but after that he didn't feel a thing - probably shock.

I was equally staunch, just in case the enemy was listening.

Likewise, untimely is not strictly accurate, far from it. In fact the operation saved my life from the head full of rotten teeth originally demolished experimentally in Dunedin where local schoolkids were treated at the biggest murder house in the motu - Otago University's School of Dentistry - so student dentists could practise on shiny rooms-full of screaming children.

By puberty, almost every tooth in my head was drilled out to within a whisker of structural existence and filled with mercury amalgam (which fell out later).

If I was a good girl, they gave me capsules of mercury (a deadly poison) to take home. Invariably it escaped and disappeared into the wilds of my bedroom somewhere; so much for brain damage.

My bilateral cross-bite attended dental conferences, with me unwillingly attached.

I gagged on gluggy, pink moulding paste, incurred wrath by breaking an orthodontic plate while mysteriously stepping on it in my pyjamas pocket when it was meant to be safely in my mouth, and developed a full-blown case of extreme dental phobia, which led directly to the life-threatening head full of rot. I blame the Otago Dental School. Had I a taste for litigation, I'd take retrospective class action.

A friend's wealthy American mother recently had cadaver teeth transplanted into her jaw, instead of dentures. She reckons once the roots grow in they're not someone else's, they're hers.

Apparently in late 16th-century England dabblers in dentistry bought human teeth to make dentures. Waterloo teeth were a 19th-century version, using teeth looted from the dead on the battlefield. Eeeek!

I might be still learning to drive my new dentures - marvellous, contemporary acrylic sculptural masterpieces - along with the fetching new lisp, but I'm incredibly grateful no corpses were involved.