Dental Horrrrrrooorrrrrrrr.....

I’m heading to England! 14 days and counting… I’m off on a two week road trip and, given more recent travels have had their ups and downs, am trying to pre-empt any foreseeable risks… one of which is… teeth problems.

No one wants to go on a long-looked-forward-to adventure only to be thwarted by tooth mishaps! And… truthfully, I’ve had a couple of slowly deteriorating ivories, and ignored them because – well, there are far more interesting things to spend ones’ money on… like cheese…

HOWEVER… I sensed Luck rubbing its evil little hands as I made my rather rigid English itinerary… and so, I stare back at you Luck (I shan’t call it Lady because why should hindrances always be blamed on a woman!) and say, “Ah-hu! One less route (mind the pun) for you to deter my joy!” I arranged to see a dentist to remove one of the three potential luck-co-conspirators.

With some trepidation I agreed to go by bike with my Chinese colleague to a close-by dentist. I did wonder about riding a bike post-tooth-extraction, but who knew what magic a REAL Chinese dentist could perform.

We took a 15 minute ride from my school based apartment, chitting and chatting as we went. In my minds eye I saw a quick, flick up the right lip, pair of pliers, one-two-three and POP… tooth out. Bloodless, painless, swift and… clap clap, job done.

I still wonder at my optimism sometimes…

“We park here”, said Lilly, indicated a non-descript side street with no reference to dentistry… I wondered where it was we were going. Then two steps behind a store, an elongated apartment appeared. A man was pacing outside wearing a dentist-like white apron, Lilly approached him, speaking Chinese while he continued to pace…

“Dway dway!”, he said, looking at her and motioning us both inside.

We entered what I can only describe as a relatively wide corridor. Admittedly it was clean smelling and looking and I liked the white attire. Familiarity makes us feel safe.

The dentist motioned for me to sit in the dentist chair, a chair with that appropriate light blue covers at top and bottom, that semi-light ET’ing down, a trolly to one side and a spit bowl to the other… upon closer look… the spit bowl was… well… turning a slight green colour, the trolly… covered in house-brand cling film with what appeared to be things growing underneath? However, I was not one to be rude, and so laid my head back and hoped for the best.

Lilly explained my needs and confirmed price… $20 for a tooth extraction. 

“Easy” implied the Dentist, “After a few minutes of extraction we can make a new tooth!”.

“My goodness”, I thought, “Our Australian nanny state forcing us to wait weeks and months to get this sort of thing done… what luck”.

The dentist showed me the options, one being a metal screw directly into my gum (I thought NOT), the other a bridge type contraction… I wondered how the measurements and denture could be put together in such a short time… Maybe our nanny state has a point – not always – but certainly when it comes to medical treatments.

I decided to decline. Lets just go straight for the tooth extraction and go from there.

Lilly was rather concerned, disinclined to see my extraction and swiftly found a seat out of eye sight! The dentist, meanwhile, laid me down and proceeded to analyse the tooth situation… a short amount of pushing and pulling and thrusting up of my gum resulted in confirmation that I needed a quick X-Ray.

I was moved three steps from the operation chair and ushered into a closet… a closet with an x-ray machine, a broom and some chemical cleaning products.

It was confirmed my tooth was in a terrible state of affairs and something needed to happen… well, I knew that.

I was laid back on the chair and the torture began. Now, I do not blame the dentist, he did the best he could… however I might suggest that before taking on a Western client one knows that different ‘races’ are built differently, from height to skin colour to… well… to teeth… but lets take one step at a time.

A needle appeared. I knew a needle would appear… but when it ACTUALLY appears… well… its always a nightmare isn’t it?

Fortunately, different to when I had a tooth out in the UK when the student dentist accidently numbed my eyeball as opposed to my gum (try blinking with a numb eyeball! IMPOSSIBLE!), this dentist knew where to put the needle in order for the anaesthetic to numb the gum… for a while atleast.

So one, two, three, four pricks; a few minutes wait and numbness in the area (if only everything were so simple!). The procedure began.

I really do believe that the absolute worst part of dentil work is the needle… the prick… then the ache of the slow push of a foreign liquid into the most slender capillaries of the body…

I mean… I THOUGHT that… I was soon to discover the worst part…

My dentist popped a stopper back on the syringe he’d used to inject the anaesthetic (I’d never seen a stopped been put back on a syringe… in my experience, they went in the bin… I tried not to wonder whether said syringe had been used on other patients, but did so… nonetheless).

He then unwrapped a tool, then another and another. First was a ‘gum-pusher’, having lost most of my tooth already the dentist needed to get some grip on the remaining bone, so pushed back some of my gum (with all of his might!). He pushed and pushed and pushed, til his sweat dripped on my shirt.

Another tool was taken up. I felt something gripped, I hoped it was my whole tooth… but then SNAP and the worst snowfall of my life… flakes of my tooth falling on my tongue. There was no sucky-machine, so while this was going on I was swallowing mouthful after mouthful of my own blood.

The dentist carried on, I yelled when I head another CRACK… and more tooth fell from its place into my mouth.

“Be calm! Relax!” he said in Chinese to Lilly, and converted to me. I spread my 

hands and opened my eyes to Lily suggesting… “And HOW do you think I SHOULD relax?!?!?!” I don’t know if my charades were up to par at this point.

I lay there while I heard bones in my mouth click and clack. Crack and fall onto my tongue. The eee-aww eee-aww as the dentist tried to wobble one part, then the next, of my tooth out of my head. Blood continued to dribble down my throat and it took all my strength not to throw up.

Over 45 minutes the sweating dentist used every tool in his box. At times I felt even he believed that the tooth would never come out… not all of it atleast. As he continued to pull and push and jab and stab the anaesthetic wore off… I yelped and squealed as best I could when the pain shot from my tooth to my brain… The dentist finally suggested an additional few stabs of the needle… and in my pain… I agreed…

I could hardly walk away with half an empty cavity… what was begun must be finished!

And so… it continued. Blood smeared across my cheeks along the glove of the dentist as he manoeuvred from one side of my face to the other… he dabbed dutifully while wiping his brow. Gauze apparently not a thing, cotton wool balls were placed near the site of extraction and shortly removed, having turned from white to deathly red. I watched as a mound of blood red cotton-wool turned to a mountain…

New tools were taken out of drawers. At one point I decided ‘eyes closed’ would speed up the experience… but when I opened my eyes, I saw that the other ‘dentist’ was filming the experience… for what reason, I know not… but I was not best pleased.

I wanted to scream, ‘Will it ever be over!’. I felt like I was in one of those nightmares you just cannot wake from. The CRACK of the tooth when it broke rang in my ears… then the SNAP when the grip of the tool slipped… but EVENTUALLY there was an internal moan, an eek… and a THRUP…

The dentist said.. “OK!”

Horrah!!! The tooth was OUT…

Jimminy crickets… the BLOODY PAIN!

I sat up… dizzy… I felt whiter than I’ver ever felt… it seemed all my blood had drained from my body and my hands were shaking… I looked around and my vision zoned in from grey to black and back to light…

The dentist then, holding up parts of my humanness, explained to Lilly that Chinese people only have ONE root, where I had… THREE! That’s what the problem was… (I wonder he didn’t see that in the bloody X-Ray?!?!), furthermore, that ONE of my roots was particularly problematic because it was at a right angle… hence the sweating, sweltering and Ancient-Grecian-style YANKING of the tooth…

Hang on a minute? So… all the pain and the time… is because I have a weird tooth? WHAT!?!?!

I did not say this and so exhausted by trying NOT to throw up on the dentist because of the blood swallowing, heaving pain and general experience, I paid the man some money… who knows how much, and who knows why?...

Delirious, Lilly gave me some instructions to which I nodded to but knew I’d not remember (again, no blood in the brain) and we headed to the closest chemist to obtain some pain killers… or so I thought.

We rode (note to ALL reading this… DO NOT RIDE after tooth extraction, not a wisdom tooth a front tooth… just NO tooth extraction!) to the ‘closest chemist (I say this loosely)’. The dentist hadn’t given specific drugs so we asked the ‘chemist’ for the appropriate drugs. Upon bringing these home, I thought it best to look them up…

Both were for STDs… I felt maybe these weren’t the right drugs for me… so popped a couple of paracetamol and with shaking hands and wobbly legs, headed to bed before my evening classes.

Last few days? Puffy cheeked and sore, my hope that the pain today means for a stress less trip soon!