May 27th, 2025Kyle’s Rant
The year was 1975, I was a freshfaced little boy minding my own business in a classroom of the Hora Hora Primary School in the small city of Whangarei in Northland, New Zealand.
In fact, to get you into the nostalgia, I encourage you to scan the QR code where I have prepared a musical track to take you back. Over the school speaker the (ding, ding, dong) chimes sounded followed by the crackling voice of the secretary: “Kyle Barnes, please come to the dental clinic, I repeat, could Kyle Barnes please come to the dental clinic.”
I dragged myself from class and slowly made my way over the bitumen hopscotch court and down through the muddy playground where fonder memories of innocence and play evaporated as I turned the corner and faced the “Murder House”.
I was immediately ushered into the chair and introduced to a student dental nurse. As the music of Seasons in the Sun, a song by Terry Jacks, came over the radio, she began her assault. Hitting every piece of gum and lip on her way to my molar, and without much of an inspection to start, she rammed the needle in and got to work with the drill.
Don’t get me wrong, I was quite comfortable in the afternoon sun, listening to the radio with her rather large boob resting on my forehead, and sometimes making its way into my eye. Forward an hour or so and I left the clinic with a huge lip and both cheeks swollen up like a chipmunk from the misplaced needle at the shaky hands of the trainee and a large filling in my molar.
This happened a couple of times on each side of my mouth, my brand-new adult teeth gouged out and filled with half a tonne of amalgam. It seems like that is what the Murder House did in the seventies. You had a ready stream of lab rats to practise on, they just needed to be plucked from the classroom.
I even saw a young cohort come out of there with a shiny new silver filling on her front tooth. Her parents were livid. I have been lucky enough to sport a good set of chompers and have never since had a filling, so I am pretty sure my attendance to the cavity creator was simply to practise on.
However now the amalgam on both molars has started to subside and the teeth crack, and that costs. It seems I must get it all scraped out and get the two munchers capped. And although I have paid over $100 per week since I was 30, all those tight bludgers at the health fund will pay for is $500 on the first $1900 cap.
And because they work on calendar years, I have to wait until next year to get the second one done if I want to claim.
It seems cruel that the practice of the day was to bugger up someone’s smile in the name of knowledge and make them pay dearly when they get into their 50s. Hora Hora Murder House rant over…
(Ed’s note: I had a great fear of dentists as a kid, so much so one of them put me completely under for a filling, aged seven. No anaesthetist needed. Hmmm.)
