“I pulled out my own tooth because I couldn’t get a dentist appointment – I had no choice,” said a dad who was forced to use pliers to remove the tooth after failing to get a dentist appointment.
Chris Langston, 50, was in terrible pain for six months as he tried to find an NHS dentist to help him. His back molar was loose and hurt when he ate, drank, or even talked.
But he couldn’t afford the £90 private fees for tooth removals and the nearest emergency dentist was over 30 miles away. So, he used his pliers to remove it at his home in Oswestry, Shropshire.
He said: “I’d been trying to get an appointment for around six months but I couldn’t get one. Private dentists wanted £40 for the check up and another £40 or £50 for the removal. It was £80 or £90 for the extraction privately, and I couldn’t afford that.”
“It was around six months ago that I felt it go loose. It gradually got worse, you sort of leave it. I’ve never had a major toothache.”
Chris said as the tooth got looser, it became painful whenever he spoke. “Every time I spoke or swallowed or drank or ate, it was agony, ” he added. “I wanted to go for an emergency dentist but that was a 60 mile round trip.
“I couldn’t get there with the kids. So I took the pliers.” The dad resorted to pliers because of spiralling dental costs and said he knew he had to “suck this up, tug and pull down on the pliers”.
“I wouldn’t recommend it. Not to anyone. It was horrible,” he added. “It was just out of necessity at the time, it was the circumstances. I can imagine there’s a dentist rolling their eyes reading this.
“I was in the worst pain with the tooth. I could see it hanging out. I had the kids so I couldn’t have the brandy.”
“I had a strong cup of tea afterwards. It felt like a massive void in my mouth.” Chris said he felt “weak at the knees” after pulling his own tooth out and nearly fainted, but the pain relief was worth it.
He explained: “What I had to do was get the pliers, because it was right at the back, give it a tug and out it came. It’s impossible to get an NHS appointment in Oswestry. Fingers crossed everything stays in place so that I don’t have to get these out again.
“As soon as I touched it, it hurt. When I grabbed hold of it, it was like do I or not. It was a shock. Quite a pull but it came out quite clean.”
He said his children were horrified after the bathroom ordeal which nearly made him “pass out” as he became “weak at the knees”. “To psych yourself up, it’s a lot of adrenaline,” he said.
“My sister was like oh my God, but I haven’t shown my mum as she’ll say it’s disgusting. But it was a relief, there was a little bit of blood. It pulled out nice and easy.
“There were two roots in and half a root out. It took quite a pull. It makes me cringe. The metal on the teeth is not a nice feeling.”
Chris says that since tugging the tooth out last Saturday the pain has reduced to a dull ache but says the Government needs to get a grip on the dentistry crisis.
He added: “The week before all I could eat was soup and a roll. Now I can eat steak. The pain is not nearly as bad as it was. It just aches.
“It should never have got to this stage where I was forced to pull out my own teeth. The Government needs to do something urgently. It’s been like this in Oswestry for years. When I first moved here you could ring up and get an appointment in the afternoon.”
“You can only get a same day appointment at an emergency dentist, but that’s 30 miles away. The private is out of my realm of affordability.”
The crisis in NHS dentistry reached the streets earlier this week when hundreds of people queued up for two days outside a dental practice in Bristol to register.
This article was crafted with the help of AI tools, which speed up the Daily Express editorial research. A Daily Express editor reviewed this content before it was published. You can report any errors here
