So where do you think Jake got the idea to pull his own tooth with pliers? From his dad of course! Read the story below. It’s an excerpt from Discovery’s new book, Deadliest Catch Desperate Hours and there’s alot of Phil Harris in it! In the book, Capt. Phil tells lots of stories as do the other skippers and deckhands. Keep in mind these tales span a lifetime of fishing and may have taken place last year or twenty years ago. This is a good one….
–Captain Phil Harris
The day before we were leaving for king crab season, I had an abscessed tooth, and it was just driving me nuts. There’s no dentist in Dutch Harbor, and at that time there wasn’t even a doctor. There was an EMT. And he goes, “Hey look, I can’t pull a tooth. I don’t have the anesthesia, the equipment, the staff.”
I said, “You got a pair of pliers? You gotta get the mother out of my mouth, man. It’s just driving me nuts.”
So I was sitting in a chair with two of the biggest guys on the boat holding me down. And this guy goes in with just a regular pair of hardware store pliers, and he’s trying to pull my molar. And he ends up breaking it off. There’s no novocaine, no drugs, no anything. I’m wide awake and sober. Now there’s blood everwhere, and there’s just a chunk of tooth stkicking out, not enough for him to grab. We’re in a pickle.
So now he gets a regular claw hammer and a chisel–a regular cold chisel you use to cut metal, not a surgical instrument by any means. What he hoped to do was get down to the gum line, and give it a real good whack, and hope the tooth broke in pieces that he could grab with a pair of needle nose pliers.
I mean, that was about as painful as you can get. I’ve done alot of things that were painful, and I can take pain with best of them, but that was almost more than I could stand. There was blood pouring out of me. The guys on either side, they’re puking–they’re holding me, turning around, and throwing up on the floor, turning back, and holding me some more. I’m just to the point of passing out. And he’s whacking me over and over. He pulled out a couple chunks, but there was a big bunch in there that he couldn’t get out so I went fishing like that.
After we made the first trip it was all I could take, so we made arrangements in Anchorage to fly a guy in–some sort of surgeon. the guy’s name, I never will forget, was Luther Paine. They knocked me out, pulled everything out, and I was back on an airplane a day later. And in retrospect I should have done that in the first place.
