Please, Let It Be Serious By Darren Baker

česky

In the old Wild West, a patient who needed a tooth pulled only got a shot of whisky to numb the pain. That may sound stingy on the part of the dentist, but given all the saloon brawls going on at the time, one shot was probably all he could afford. In the new Wild East, I was lucky to get any anesthetic at all when I first arrived at a dentist's office.

I had developed a toothache that had gotten worse with each rumor I heard about dentists in this country. For instance, one man insisted that Czech dentists used plum brandy instead of whisky, and then only for themselves. Another that dentists often took their tools home with them to work on the car. Nonsense, I told myself. But there was one point on which everybody was in agreement: The problem had better be serious, else no anesthetic, no plum brandy, nothing except zzzzzzz!!!

Not knowing my way around, I was escorted to the dentist by a colleague. The office looked depressing. Gray walls, dirty windows, equipment that had probably seen better days during the Cold War. The dentist was very short with little fat fingers, almost like sausages. She didn't know a word of English, so the procedure took place with my colleague translating. Normally, the dentist asks you a question, you answer it, then you open your mouth up wide. In this case, the dentist kept poking in as I started to speak, meaning my colleague had to translate something like, "Ah-uh-err-eh-oh-auu!!!" No problem, though. The "auu!" told her all she needed to know.

Turns out I didn't have a mere cavity, rather a serious root canal infection. Thank God for that! I would be getting an anesthetic after all. My relief was short-lived, however, for five minutes after the injection, I had the feeling the anesthetic still wasn't working. But time is money, so the dentist picked up the drill. And then, for some unexplained reason, she began sweating profusely. I don't know if she was nervous or having a hot flash or what. Fortunately, the beads of sweat rolled down her neck instead of off the end of her nose, thus saving me from having to undergo a kind of Chinese water torture at the same time. Still, I cringed as she bent over me and commenced to zzzzzzz!!!

It was pure hell. Here was this dentist, sweating buckets as her sausage fingers angled the drill deeper and deeper into my throbbing tooth. I squirmed as much as I could to get away, but I was trapped. The whole time my colleague was just sitting in her chair and flipping through a magazine, completely unaware of the horror unfolding next to her. But at last, there was silence. The dentist put the drill away and instructed her assistant to do something. The worst was over, I thought. Suddenly, the assistant stood behind me and gripped my head with both her hands, just like in the war movies when a doctor would say, "All right, boys. Hold him down while I saw off his leg."

I'll forgo the rest of the details. Suffice it to say I have a new dentist and a new tooth. I should note that a few weeks afterwards, my colleague told me that she had gone to have some work done by that same dentist. It was nothing serious, she said, just a small cavity. But she was shocked by the rough treatment she had received there. Had I noticed it too, she wondered.