Teeth Or Consequences

Monday January 19th, 2009 - Chicago, IL

What would life in my wacky little world be without starting the year off with another trip to the dental chair? I’ve had enough experience with dentists to last me about twelve lifetimes and today was another dose. I was scheduled to get a checkup and a cleaning.

I’ve had several root canals in the past couple of years and part of the reason for that is I have been lax on going to get checkups. I don’t have insurance so it’s a pain not only in the mouth but in the wallet too. It’s one of those unpleasant tasks of life like income taxes or pretending to be interested in a hot looking woman’s shopping conquests. It’s painful.

I’m trying to do things smarter in my life and it’s a constant struggle but doing stuff like this helps a lot. They called and told me it was time for my six month checkup and I knew it so rather than pretend to forget it I called back and scheduled my appointment for today and got it over with. It was $140 now rather than $3500 later for another nasty root canal.

My dentist is Russian and does high quality work but sometimes the atmosphere can be a little unsympathetic in that office. His wife is a dentist too and she’s also Russian as are most of the staff and many of the patients too. Many times I’ve been in there and not been able to understand anything anyone says and I feel like a total outsider. I felt like it today.

The dental assistant was Russian and didn’t speak much English at all and she sat me in a chair in an office way back in the corner I’ve never been to before. Usually I’m right up front because I’m having some complicated expensive procedure done but today I got put back in the dungeon area for whatever reason. She strapped on my bib and it was go time.

My usual dentist was working on someone else so I got his wife for the first time. She’s a real ball buster and got in there and started poking and scraping and picking with all the pointy little tools that look like they should be used for opening walnuts. It didn’t make a difference to her that I was flinching and grabbing the chair. She just kept on scraping.

I thought this was supposed to just be a cleaning but she went in there like she left some buried treasure in there a few years ago and wanted to get it back. She was definitely on a mission to either clean my teeth or poke every last nerve in my mouth and get even for all the injustices the United States has done to Russia over the years. It was all pretty painful.

I could tell I wasn’t getting any sympathy so I just sat there and tried to absorb the pain until it was over. I know she didn’t mean any harm but Russians have had to absorb a lot of their own pain so I don’t think she considered this anything special. Waiting outside in line for toilet paper in forty below zero weather is pain. A dental cleaning is no big deal.

The good news was I had no cavities this time. Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever had that in my life before today. Maybe it’s because all my teeth are filled now but whatever the case at least I don’t have to keep draining my wallet for a while and can relax until July when I have to come back and get this done all over again. I’ll take this as a gift and be thankful.