‘He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.’
Michel de Montaigne
The appointment was routine enough.
An ancient wisdom tooth had been grumbling and crumbling away at the back of my mouth for some time. At my last check up, I’d been told I’d be better off without it and it was time to follow through…
The dentist gave me Novocaine, doing her best to hide the huge needle below my sightline as she prepared to strike, though my imagination managed to conjure the cartoon shadow on the white wall. Then she went to work. I felt no pain, only the squeaky tugging of tiny roots clinging to gums that had been their home for decades. When the tooth finally came loose, she put it on the tray in front of me and pointed to a thin black ring once hidden behind my receding gums. ‘Bacteria’, she said. I tried to muster the appropriate response through lips still numb and with a wodge of cotton clamped between my remaining teeth to stem the bleeding.
I left the surgery feeling bruised but relieved the ordeal was over. That night an abscess developed on the roof of my mouth and grew to the size and shape of a kidney bean. Some time in the early hours of Sunday morning, the abscess must have burst, and by the time I saw the dentist again, the kidney bean was no more than a flap of raw skin, and the pain had gone. She insisted on X-rays to make sure there was no underlying cause. There was. She found an enormous cavity, hidden between two teeth, and worse, worrying signs that the bone of my jaw was eroding. Thus began a series of expensive and often uncomfortable treatments that are not entirely over yet, and a warning that unless I control the downhill slide in my teeth, and cap those that are too far gone, I am likely to lose them all in the not too distant future.
Harsh news though nothing out of the ordinary for a man of my age, and yet it hit me hard. Too hard. I determined to pull myself together and I fully expected my low mood would go as quickly as it had come. But a few weeks later, when the cavity had been filled and the gaps in my lower gums excavated with a surprisingly painful water jet, I was still listless and morose.
If I was making a mountain out of a molehill – and I was – it seemed I’d been tripping over a lot of molehills recently. Varicose veins on the calf of my left leg that made me limp for the first few hours of every day, and arthritis in my little finger that was sore, especially in the winter. I had a knee that clicked and a lump on my back that might be growing, I didn’t dare look. All thoroughly minor ailments and par for the course, so why was I taking it all so personally? It was not depression, though it seemed that way to those close to me. They sensed my absence, circling and soothing me with their quizzical love, and I was sorry for them, more so than for myself. But I didn’t feel low, so much as panicked.
Others had real mountains to climb. A friend and colleague, a man who gave me opportunities beyond my talents, a man I hadn’t seen for some years, wrote a serene email to tell me of his terminal diagnosis. For a week or two, that humbled me and put my indulgence in nebulous fear to shame. We’ve met for lunch more often since, and I’m glad we do. Another, my former editor and a dear man, has kept me up to date on a long series of operations that seemed to go on forever. And just three months ago, Phil, my best friend in the world and a man I’ve know for more than forty-five years, called to tell me he had cancer of the oesophagus. That floored me, not least because I’d been staying with him at his home in France until the day he went to the hospital for the tests. When he dropped me off at the airport for my return flight, I’d wished him luck and told him not to worry. I said it was probably indigestion.