WROCLAW, Poland -- For some reason, and I'm trying not to read too much into it, my wife thought she ought to share with me yesterday a HuffPost story about a Polish woman who yanked all the teeth out of her ex-boyfriend's unconscious mouth. No fooling. I was watching fishing or the UFC, I can't remember which, and the missus calls from the other side of the room, "Listen to this... " and proceeded to fill me in on the details in an episode of misanthropy so grisly even Eastern Europeans seem to disapprove.
Evidently one Marek Olszewski went to see his ex-girlfriend, Anna Mackowiak, a 34-year-old dentist in Wroclaw, to be treated for a toothache. Mackowiak allegedly showed Olszewski into her facility, locked the door behind them, heavily sedated him and, according to remarks given to the Austrian Times, "I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions. But when I saw him lying there I just thought, 'What a bastard' and decided to take all his teeth out," which she did, one-by-one, prior to wrapping Mackowiak's head and jaw tightly in gauze, waking him from his stupor and telling him there had been a slight complication and he'd need to see a specialist. According to reports, she then sent him home where the defanged ex-beau discovered the extent of his misfortune.
Mackowiak now faces up to three years in jail along with malpractice charges and who knows what else.
In a stupendously bitter twist of irony, Olszewski's new girlfriend, the woman for whom he allegedly left Mackowiak in the first place, has now broken up with him saying, per Olszewski, "[S]he can't be with a man without teeth."
Maybe that's it, but I think she can't be with a man without intelligence. Dude! You dumped this woman for someone else and you think it's a good idea to let her knock you out and dig around in your maw with excavating tools?!
My wife probably only shared the story with me because she's aware of my perverse interest in, well, perversity. But I can't be 100 percent certain she didn't have some secondary motivation. You see, I'm not entirely unfamiliar with spiteful harpy maniacs. I dated several of them. But honey, seriously, I'm not stupid. I know you'd dice me up in my sleep if I merely contacted an ex to ask for my crock pot back and if I'm intelligent enough to forsake a once beloved cookware item for the sake of sustained marital bliss, surely I'm sufficiently bright not to ask an ex to dope me up and go after my tender parts with drills and picks and skewers.
Mind you, that makes me a whole ton brighter than Marek Olszewski who went to see his ex just days, not weeks or months or years -- days after breaking up with her for another woman.
Neither I nor, as far as I know, anyone affiliated with this publication endorses or condones the use of dental training to mutilate a former lover, whether in retribution or just plain spite.
That said, there are two kinds of idiots in the world. The first kind has bad things happen to them because they don't think ahead. The second kind has bad things happen to them even though they do think ahead because what they think is fence-post stupid.
"Oy -- my tooth hurts. Hmm. Anna's a dentist. Yeah I dumped her last week and she's probably pissed, but she's a professional."
When it comes to stupid, Marek Olszweski might not be in a class by himself, but whatever class he's in, it doesn't take long to call the roll. Perhaps in the coming weeks, as he's sipping tepid borscht, he'll find some comfort in the fact that it could have been worse. At least his ex-girlfriend wasn't a urologist, or a brain surgeon, or (shiver) a proctologist. Fake teeth you can get, but other parts are more or less irreplaceable. Get misused by a colon grater and you can abandon all hope of ever getting back to your former carefree-pootered self. It's just one of those things, kind of like how even a tuxedo can't make Val Kilmer hot again.
As for Dr. Mackowiak, there's plenty of work for prison dentists. The pay's not much and the hours drag, but hey, it's got to be better than having your idiot ex-boyfriend flounce into your clinic to ask for a favor.