In the last 6 weeks, I’ve had 5 teeth crack or chip. Naturally this has necessitated getting myself to a dentist, and that is where my story begins…
The dental office sat on an Antigua side street above the west end of the park, nestled between a tailor and a bed and breakfast. All three were named Ovalle, and it made me wonder if the family was as financially diversified as the location suggested. I walked in the front door of the clinic and announced my presence to the receptionist. She smiled, pointed upstairs, and indicated that the dentist would be with me shortly.
Wallpaper pictures of Pixar characters made a lazy rotation around the room. In a corner sat resilient toys made of impact- and stain-resistant plastic. A hygienist smiled and me and reminded me that the dentist would be with me shortly.
I busied myself by trying not to wonder about the dentist’s qualifications. If the Peace Corps had sent me to her, then she was certified by the U.S. State Department as equal to the care I would receive at home. Still, a lot of uncertainties bubbled through. It’s hard not to think about all the things that can go wrong in a third world dental clinic. That it’s a common fashion statement for Guatemalans to have their teeth pulled and replaced with some combination of gold, faux pearl, and star designs only made it more so. I’m rather attached to the natural elegance of my front teeth.
After a few minutes a different hygienist directed me to the chair where it would all take place. The big show.
The dentist turned out to be a dentista, and she immediately began questioning me about my teeth and brushing habits. I answered as best I could, but when it came time to describe why I was there, my equal mix of academic and countrified Spanish began to fail me. My previous language education had never prepared me for the possibility of tooth decay.
“Well, uh,” I began, “My teeth are…breaking…little pieces.”
As I started to falter, she held up a single latex-covered palm.
“Stop,” she told me, “and let’s switch to English.” She spoke it with a sizable accent, but was quite understandable.
“Right. Lately my teeth have begun to chip. There are little pieces missing out of the cutting edges, and I want to get it dealt with before any more damage occurs.”
“Ah, yes; I see,” she began as she poked delicately with her mirror and hook probe. “Unfortunately, the damage has progressed too far and we’re going to need to pull these two.” She indicated my top front teeth.
I nearly fell out of the seat as she began laughing. Apparently she was no stranger to the aversion gringos held towards obvious prosthetics.
“I kid, I kid. This is easy work.”
I settled back into the deep recline of the dental chair, heart still battering itself against my ribcage. I was ready at any moment to flee if I saw the slightest flash of gold.
She picked up a drill with a flat, saucer-like attachment at the business end. “Don’t move,” she told me, all humor aside.
She pressed the power button and it began to whir. Like a bad horror movie, it inched closer to my face. My eyes bulged, but I was too afraid of what additional damage turning away might cause. It became lost inside my mouth, the sensation a dull vibration that resonated along my jaw and into my eardrums.
“At least it doesn’t hurt,” the relentlessly optimistic part of my psyche chirped.
My teeth began to heat up, the way they do when you hold hot coffee in that space between your teeth and lips. Smoke—honest to goodness smoke—began billowing out of my mouth. I closed my eyes. My optimism, already in the gross minority, was beaten almost to death by my increasingly powerful neuroses. Somehow I just knew that from this day forward I would never be able to smile in public again.
A few more minutes of drill work and the dentist asked one of the two hovering hygienists to fetch the composite. When it came, she slathered some on my filed teeth and began forming them into approximations of what they used to be. I couldn’t tell how good of a job she was doing, whether it would dry clear or white, and how it would hold up to the daily rigors I put my mouth through.
“That would make a great ‘that’s what she said’ joke,” my cowed optimism whispered, not looking for another pummeling. My pessimism left it alone, just this once.
Opening my eyes, I peered up into the orange safety goggles the dentist had donned. She was using the UV light to harden the composite. I wondered what the likelihood was of getting mouth cancer from such treatments. Was it like a CT scan, dishing out carcinomas to one unlucky patient in every thousand? I believed my optimism when it said it was less.
She pulled the ray gun out of my mouth and stuck a piece of black electrical tape in instead.
“Bite,” she commanded.
I bit.
She looked at the strip. “Do any of your teeth feel larger than they should?”
“The top left one feels longer than normal.”
She nodded, as if this statement confirmed what she already knew. Out came the drill again. Out billowed the smoke. Out boiled my neuroses.
When she was done, I ran my tongue along the offending incisor. It felt more normal.
Again she stuck the black electrical tape in my mouth and told me to bite. Only then did it occur to me that she was checking that the pressure of my bite was equal along the strip. Equal pressure meant equal tooth length.
Out came the drill twice more, and each time I winced in expected mutilation. When she was finally done she handed me a mirror. My teeth had a different texture, somehow more rough and plastic, but the mirror told me that no permanent damage had been done. Aesthetically they looked no different than they had a month ago.
Somewhere, deep inside, my narcissism breathed a sigh of relief.
Find the accompanying pictures here: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week30?authkey=Gv1sRgCOWiw92E3ev5Dw
Glad that all worked out in the end-- spectacular post.
ReplyDeleteI swear, Guatemalans or maybe all Latins, love to pull your leg. A cruel jest but pretty funny.
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