In 1990, there was the case of John Major's wisdom teeth, which were operated on during the weekend before the Conservative Party's leadership contest between Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine. The troubled relationship with our third set of molars is evidence of our evolution from cave dwellers. While our anachronistic molars make trouble for our dainty jaws, our enlarged brains invent thousands of horror stories about them. After hearing the umpteenth tale of the patient who woke up from a general anaesthetic to find knee-shaped bruises on his or her chest, where the dentist had knelt for a final tug on a recalcitrant tooth, I pleaded for a local anaesthetic. My claim to pain had come over Christmas, when my third molars rustled up an agonising gum infection, tragically preventing any consumption of turkey or alcohol.
Problems usually occur if wisdom teeth are impacted.
Through lack of space, they fail to fully emerge in the mouth, crowding other teeth and creating nooks and crannies, where gum infections or tooth decay can flourish. When time comes to get rid ot them, you can plump for either a general anaesthetic in a hospital and have all your wisdom teeth removed in a state of blissful ignorance, or take a local anaesthetic at a dentist's and have them extracted in a state of anxious awareness. Not a hard choice, except the general costs more, and there are risks with general anaesthetics. Oral surgeons, as wisdom teeth specialists are known, won't whip out all four wisdom teeth if only one or two are causing a fuss. You would think that such extractions are much of a muchness, but my friendly, no-nonsense oral surgeon, Babita Arora, who specialises in extracting wisdom teeth, sat me in her chair and warned that it is impossible to predict how difficult removing each impacted wisdom tooth will be.