I expected something bad to happen at my dental appointment for what I thought was a cleaning, but nothing worse than this. The waiting room looked as if the last time it was remodeled was in 1978. I checked in with the girl at the front desk. “My name is Ben. I’m here for my ten o’clock cleaning.”
She said, “Your name is Ben, and you’re here for two fillings.”
“Two fillings?” I said. “No one ever told me about any fillings.”
She never looked up from her computer. “Have a seat,” she said. “And we’ll call you when we’re ready.”
I began to wonder if they thought I was another patient. So I sat in that noisy waiting room, with a TV blaring, where half the people were asleep. A few skeletons sat in their chairs, too.
They called my name only ten minutes later, to my surprise, and an assistant with a mask over his face began bringing me to one of the rooms with a dental chair.
A female assistant came in and said her name while I was lying there like a torture victim. She mumbled her name to where I couldn’t decipher what it was. She sounded half-dead when she asked if I was feeling any pain.
“I have this sore in my mouth that won’t heal,” I said.
She looked away at another room across the room. “I’ll let the dentist know,” she said before she left.
I didn’t feel reassured.
A dentist came in a few minutes later with another dentist (if they were both dentists). The female dentist whom I guessed was the main dentist asked where I was feeling the pain.
I said, “I have a sore in my mouth after biting down on it a month ago.”
She made it sound as if they couldn’t operate and I would have to reschedule. I didn’t want to do that, so I said, “I don’t feel any pain unless I bite down on it.”
So the other dentist, whom I guessed was her subordinate, gave me a form to fill out for them to send a prescription to my pharmacy. I began to fill it out before giving it back to her assistant who ended up working on my fillings. He wore a surgical mask, goggles, and a shower cap, along with a bright light shining from his forehead. His whole head was covered. I couldn’t see who he was, and his foreign accent was thick to where I couldn’t understand what he was saying. He kept looking out the room when he was operating on my teeth with his assistant, the woman who didn’t look at me before.
They hovered over me while I had to keep my mouth open. Usually, a filling replacement took twenty minutes to a half hour at most, but this took over an hour for two fillings. And usually, the dentist would tell me I would feel a slight pinch before injecting a needle into my gums. Well, I felt a heavy pinch without a verbal warning several times when he injected the Novacaine. And usually, the dentist would leave the room for about ten minutes for the numbness to take effect before he would start drilling my teeth. But this guy went to drilling right away. I smelled the burn from the drill and the pain of the drilling through my tooth. He stopped and asked if I felt any pain. I did, quite a lot, but I also didn’t want him to inject more Novacaine because I didn’t want my mouth to be numb all day. So I accepted the pain.
“Nuh-uh,” I said.
An hour was no exaggeration. It took even longer than that. He would say, “We’re almost done” every twenty minutes or so. They were still drilling after about an hour. I didn’t believe him by the third time. They made me feel like cattle. Several other patients were being worked on in there, and my dentist kept stopping and looking away into other rooms. The procedure took so long that I was beginning to think they were building a house in my mouth. I was waiting for a contractor to show up in a vest and a flannel, with a tool belt and measuring tape to install a new bathroom.
This was the result of not going to a private practice to have dental work done. This place was something different. It was a dental place alright, where multiple dentists worked, and they were substandard.
I used to have personable dentists. They would come in, shake my hand, tell me their names, ask me what my favorite football team was, and get me in and out of there in less than an hour. But it wasn’t the case there. The dentist never even told me his name.
He with his thick foreign accent kept saying, “Close your lips” instead of asking me to close my mouth when he stuck that suction tube in me.
Close my lips? How could I close my lips? My brain didn’t know what that meant for some reason. His assistant stuck her own suction tube in there and shoved my lower jaw to close my mouth.
It was the worst hell in the dentist’s office. All that was missing was malpractice where if the dentist missed and drilled a gaping hole in my gums where the Novacaine wasn’t.
The healthcare system never was this bad twenty years or so ago. I used to never have trouble picking up prescriptions for instance. But I get phone calls nowadays where they tell me that they’re out of stock and I should try other pharmacies that might have it. I received one prescription just last week but counted the pills later to discover that I was ten pills short of thirty, so I had to call the pharmacy and tell them I was missing some. What if they thought I was lying? I would have to miss ten days. But they believed me, lucky for me.
I also used to see doctors without any scheduling mishaps. A hand surgeon never called me back to schedule an appointment when I couldn’t feel my hand a few months ago, so I never got to see him. This further proved to me that the medical system would forever be fucked.