A few days ago, my flatmate Amanda woke up with a
mind-bendingly awful toothache. “It’s like someone has reached into my mouth
and is tugging at one of my dental nerves, twirling it around his fingers! Oh,
God, I want to die!” she moaned with
uncustomary drama. An emergency session with Dr Hoe, our kindly family dentist,
revealed an abscess in the back molar.
“He-th th-o adorable!” Amanda mumbled through a
mouthful of blood-soaked bandages. “I would marry him in a heartbeat if he wathn’t th-o old.”
Saffy was scandalized. “Anna Nicole Smith! He’s
just 52!”
“He might a-th
well be th-eventy-two!”
Later, when the bandages were all removed, Amanda
said it’s no joke having a toothache. “It sounds so, like whatever, a
toothache! There is nothing achy
about a toothache. It’s bloody painful! I swear it’s the worst feeling in the
world!”
Leave it to Saffy to pipe up from the couch to say
that a toothache certainly wasn’t the worst feeling in the world. “I’ll tell
you what the worst feeling in the world is,” she said, pleased that the
attention of the room was once again focused on her. “It’s needing to pee and
there’s not a toilet in sight!”
“Oooh, that’s a good one!” I said.
“Oh, yah, hor, dat one worse than your toothache!”
said Sharyn, her glasses fogging up with excitement. Amanda didn’t look pleased
that her thunder was being stolen so blatantly and so suddenly. “Dat time, hor,
I was on the bus and I need to pee but kena traffic jam on the PIE!”
“What happened?” I asked.
“What to do? Must hold in, lah! By the time we get
to Orchard Road, I was cross-eye! But I thought, hor, if I wet myself, cannot
be help. Wah, jalat, boy, hold in for so long! Worse than giving birth, I tell
you!”
Which somehow led Saffy to recall the time she signed
up for a seaweed-wrap in a fancy spa. By the time the therapist had applied
various ointments and lotions, and then finished tucking her up between layers
of cling-foil and thick towels, she needed to pee really badly.
“I guess I could have asked the therapist to unwrap
me,” Saffy reflected, “but I felt so bad for her. She’d spent so much time
wrapping me up, you know? She was Japanese and you know how much they love to wrap stuff. So I thought
I’d hold it in. I swear to God, it was the most stressful 30 minutes in the
history of spa treatments. At one stage, I seriously considered peeing inside
the wrap and passing it all off as sweat!”
There’s something unbearably primal about the need
to pee: This gradual build up of pressure in the bladder and – if you’re
trapped on a bus or in a queue for Faye Wong concert tickets – rising panic
that if you don’t find a toilet soon, you’re literally going to pee in your
pants. Strange, too, that there’s no actual English word for it.
And I’ll never forget the time I was watching
‘Titanic’ – which, if memory serves, was a ten hour, fifteen minute movie – and
at about the two-hour mark, all that sea sloshing about had pushed my bladder
capacity to a dangerous maximum. But every time I wanted to get up from my seat
to go to the loo, something exciting would happen. In the end, I just had to
go. Which is how I missed the actual sinking of the ship, and why a few nights
later, I sat through the whole movie all over again. But this time, I didn’t
drink anything for the five hours leading up to the opening credits. It’s also
why, for hours after the movie, I suffered from a blinding dehydration migraine.
“But you know what the best feeling in the world
is?” Saffy asked. “It’s that split second when you’re in the loo, and you know
you’re in a safe and secure environment, your knickers are off, and then you
just…let…go! That feeling of relief that just washes over you.”
“Yah, yah, better than sex!” Sharyn said with
unusual excitement.
“Ohmygod, you’re so right!” Saffy said, her
impressive bosom rising to the occasion in sisterly solidarity. “Way better!
You know, if you could bottle that feeling, you’d make a fortune. I’d call mine
‘Release, by Saffy’!”
By the defeated look on Amanda’s face, you could
tell that there was no way she could now regain the upper ground in the whole
toothache conversation.
“And with my first million,” Saffy went on, “I’d
buy a portable loo. It’ll go everywhere I go! Even on the bus! How fab would
that be?”
3 comments:
poor Amanda.. As a dental student, I can totally see how traumatic that would be. I hope she's ok now at least
aww i feel bad for Amanda...so much for harvard grad not being to have the last say..no probs amanda!..u'll get the upper hand soon..
If Saffy could put all her ramblings into actions, she'll probably be a billionaire!
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