So here we are pulling teeth

Forget giving birth, broken bones and bad hangovers, real pain is the one experienced by people who have tooth problems. My fourth wisdom tooth had been playing up since May 2010 when I staggered around Venice, stoned on pain killers and rubbing my jaw. After a few weeks the pain had gone thanks to regular massage and a certain terror of the dentist, so I assumed all was well and that it was growing happily. And sure enough it started to poke through in the right place.

Ten days ago I came home from work feeling a bit sore around around the lower left side of my face and swallowed a couple of paracetemol. In the night I woke up realising that it now really hurt and was throbbing, and that my neighbour was playing music extremely loudly at 2.30 on a weeknight. I crossed the hall and hammered on her door; when she opened I opened my mouth to ask her to please turn it down. What came out was 'estchze qchze chtu peux echteintchrela muschiqsche'. She looked blank. While I was miming the perfectly obvious, her cat left her appartment causing me to cry out 'Chton Czstchat!'. This finished, I went back to bed pausing only to stare at a huge bloated bullfrog with a swollen neck in the mirror.

Friday at work was just embarassing as this type of condition does not suit the teaching profession. Saturday morning I went to the emergency dentist centre near Gare du Nord. The huge waiting room was full of people clutching various parts of their jaw, stoically waiting their turn. It's also the type of place you go to when you don't have private health insurance and the visible poverty of some made the place exceedingly grim, like a documentary on those the welfare state forgot.

Thankfully though this is France and it was pretty efficient. An X-ray showed that my poor fang was growing horizontally, pushing everything towards the centre on one side and digging in to my facial nerve on the other. The dentist cheerfully said this was a horrible emergency as my tooth could saw into tangled and mangled nerve causing paralysis. 'It's like a dolphin caught in a fishing net' he grinned. My huge left side throbbed in agony.

To cut a long story short, my deformed tusk (yes, tusk, the size and shape of a shark tooth or near) was whipped out with me on local anaesthetic . I felt ok if a bit woozy, but about 40 minutes later the pain kicked in and, a week on, hasn't really gone. Yeah sure I'm high as a kite on various doses of everything (teaching is fun again), but I still wake up in night to take a steroid paracetomol cocktail. It's getting much better and I had my stitches out today but fuck me has this been a screamingly horrid experience of sharp pain from the chin right up to the inside of the ear and dull tingling inside the skull. Not even counting I couldn't eat, smile or talk and have an open wound in my mouth.

All this brings me to say that we hold the ultimate proof that intelligent design is absolute bullshit. Why on earth do we still grow wisdom teeth if our modern, post neanderthal jaw is too small to cope with them? It's not like we've crunched sheep bones in the last few millenia . And go through all this pain? How the fuck do and did they manage when anaesthetic is crushed cloves? Time to bring out human v4.1, God.