Frantic chewing of sugar-coated nicotine gum had caused my left lower molar to go irretrievably rotten, and the dentist finally extracted it after a prolonged and heroic struggle. Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor was playing in the background and the extraordinary thing was that from start to finish the music exactly mirrored the vicissitudes of his battle to pull the tooth out. While we waited for the anaesthetic to take effect the music was gently soporific. As he applied his pliers to the tooth and carefully loosened it, the mood darkened and built to a turbulent climax until I gestured with an unhappy hand signal that I could feel the roots twisting in a place that the anaesthetic had yet to reach. He downed tools and placed two more injections of anaesthetic deep in the gum. As he did so the musical tsunami crested and broke and then flowed calmly again.
The roots were unfortunately bifurcated and it took him ten minutes of hard, sweaty physical labour with several rests in between — during which he flexed and massaged the strained muscles in his forearm — to loosen the tooth without snapping it off the roots.
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