Teeth.
I hate teeth.
If there is a Creator, the existence of teeth proves that He’s one evil son of a pre-Creator void.
I don’t have a good history with dentists, especially not in the last ten years here in Germany. I don’t blame myself for this; it’s hard to know if your dentist is good, you know? I mean, you can tell if your dentist is nice, especially since most dentists I’ve met in Germany are insane, cruel bastards, but a nice dentist isn’t necessarily a good dentist. The one dentist I went to for a rather long time seemed really nice, but as it turns out that two-tooth root canal that went on for eight months wasn’t such a success. One tooth is now missing after breaking in the middle of the night and being removed by a deranged racist emergency dentist who told me stories about how Alexander the Great slaughtered the Persians, the other is still there but apparently hasn’t been filled as far down the roots as it should have been.
If you know me in real life or follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed me complaining of pains in my jaw since last December or so. They’ve been really irritating, sometimes even making it impossible to sleep without painkillers, and they’ve been a big distraction from my work. So I went to the doctor, of course – in January, a couple of weeks after the pains started. What might be causing the pains wasn’t entirely clear, so the doctor sent me to a bunch of other doctors, including the dentist.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, my dentist was pregnant and not actually there. So I got an appointment with her replacement. She couldn’t find anything wrong with me, but sent me to have some kind of 3D scan taken of my entire jaw.
The first time I went back, they hadn’t gotten the results yet, but I was mainly there because one of my shitty fillings, done by a previous dentist, had fallen out. They put in a new one, and in the process accidentally delved too greedily and too deep, so that the new filling presses on the nerve and makes chewing quite painful.
The second time I went back, we talked about how to fix the new problem… but they hadn’t managed to look at the results yet, because they wanted to examine them with some expert. They told me they’d call me as soon as this expert was available.
I waited and waited and waited, but no call came.
When I went back for the third time, said doctor had either left or been fired (my impression was the latter) and replaced by a new doctor, one who described himself as an expert at all things jaw-related. He examined my teeth and gave me a long and aggressive speech about how all my problems were due to how crooked my teeth are, which could only be fixed via orthodontic treatment that would cost something like 6000€. What about my results? Oh, he hadn’t looked at those.
It was something of a miracle that I didn’t have a nervous breakdown right then and there. I managed to delay it until I got home.
A few weeks later I went to yet another dentist. She looked at my teeth, and within a couple of minutes noticed that there was a fucking hole in one of my fucking fillings, right where the fucking pain began. Yes. All of the idiots who had looked at my teeth before had missed the most obvious thing in the world. Unfortunately, at this point five months had passed since the pain began, and the roots were thoroughly infected.
“We’ll have to open this up to see what’s going on,” the dentist said. “It could all be mush down there.”
Not one of the best things to hear.
Attempts to fix the problem under normal circumstances failed. Even after antibiotics and painkillers and prayers to the Great Atheismo, the amount of pain caused by even coming close to the nerve made a root canal impossible. It doesn’t help that I’m mildly resistant to anaesthetics. The only solution was to sedate me.
Of course, since Germany is well on its way to copying the United States’ catastrophic healthcare system, necessary procedures like these now have to paid for out of one’s own pocket. Have I ever mentioned we’re not rich?
So, tomorrow we will paying something in the vicinity of 1600€ for me to be drugged and for several of my teeth to be fixed (all of them essentially the errors of previous dentists). Now, if you made a list of my top ten horrors, Dentists and Unconsciousness would take two of the spots. The only way this could be worse would be if the dentist’s office was on a plane. Made of spiders.
I am terrified.
If everything goes well, we will be a lot poorer but I’ll finally be able to think clearly again, which would also lead to more updates for you people. Maybe we could even finally continue our damn cooking show. It’s not easy to do a cooking show when you can’t fucking eat.
If everything doesn’t go well… you can quote Robert Burns at my funeral.
