i have no fillings after 27 years, but...
i did chip and break my front tooth aged 11, and that's cost me. Oh god, has it cost me. That tooth alone has probably had some £2k spent on it, some paid for by the NHS, but most by me. yay.

my first dentist insisted on shoving up to three needles in my mouth at once, liked to test how my teeth were developing by hitting them with a little hammer (and yet still no fillings - he failed to break them) and slapping my legs if they dared to move. the freak.

there was a brief period where i was getting casts of my teeth done every few months, and my orthodontist, the twunt, used to try and fit the clearly man-sized dental casts into my tiny lady face. it totally put my jaw out, and has a trick joint even now, making a crazy clicking sound when i eat.

the same orthodondist was responsible for the braces i stopped wearing because every time i put them in the wires caused my mouth to bleed profusely. his reaction? 'oh, don't worry, that'll stop soon'. yes, presumably when i run out of those pesky gums, you gimp.

i also had impacted wisdom teeth - all of them. pain like you've never known. so why is it when you go to a dentist about these things, their first reaction is to stab at it with a pointy thing? which made me jump, so the guy spent ten minutes trying to extract said pointy thing from my gums. ow.

however, unlike some stories here already, a word to the wise - get those wisdom teeth removed under general, and mighty powerful drugs to follow. literally, didn't feel a thing. although i swear the nhs, instead of using those little petite cylinders of cotton wool to hold my mouth open, used tampons instead. they even had the little blue strings.

but my friend has the best one. at uni, one of her fillings fell out. she went to the nearest dentist, who filled it in. afterwards, he told her that he needed the details of her dentist at home. she asked why. turned out all the fillings, bridges and whatnot she'd had were either of a terrifyingly substandard quality, dangerous, or, most frequently, apprently completely unnecessary. in other words, she'd been satisfying her dentist's unnatural fetishes since the tender age of 8. he's been struck off...
(niceandwarmandhot vive la résistance, Thu 2 Nov 2006, 15:45, Reply)