Yesterday I had to go to the dentist for a cleaning and I've got this lump in my mouth that I was sure was cancerous. The hygienist said she thought it was an abscess from a tooth. My dentist trotted in eventually, proclaiming me "lucky", because if it weren't for the lump, I'd be through the roof with pain. Here we go again; yet another root canal.
Do you sit in those seats at the dentists or doctors and look at the posters on their walls? Yesterday I was intrigued by the handy dandy chart for common mouth sores. It reminded me of one of the treats from the Dura Book Binding days, where myl friends and I would flip through medical journals from Harvard during coffee breaks. You've never seen such horror in your life. Elephantiasis, hideous groin diseases with genitals twisted and engorged with pus, faces blown up with hundreds of tiny tumors. We had no compassion at 15, of course, and we laughed our asses off. My punishment for those days is that I now teach teenagers, and I know what sociopaths they are.
My experience with my dentist since I've arrived back home is nothing short of heaven, though. Not the root canals, no...those are torture. The heavenly part is that I can trust my American dentist, and I'm grateful that he knows what he's doing. Perhaps our country is falling apart in many ways, but in terms of dentistry and medical attention, we still have it good. In Kuwait, for example, I had a "cleaning" that latest all of five minutes. It was the newest technology, according to the Indian man who did the work. He pretty much encased my entire body with cloth, including my head, made an opening for my mouth, then stood back and shot sand and water from a machine that could have launched a rocket. Most of his time was spent mopping me up, and I left there with a big glop of sand on my cheek that I didn't notice until I got home.
I went to several dentists overseas, but nobody had an x-ray machine. None of them trained in the states, and I realize that this is important.
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