| Nov. 8th, 2009 @ 01:28 pm The Good Ship Dental Drama |
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Current Mood:  concerned
Current Music: Sarah McLachlan - Ice Cream
So: on Friday, I went to the dentist. Specifically, I went to Missions of Mercy, North Carolina's roving free dental clinic, because I have no insurance and no money and a very damn broken tooth. I planned it well in advance. I'd been wearing a temporary over-the-counter tooth plug since October, and I'd worked late every night that week so I could be off work to go do this. Yes, we all hate the dentist, but sometimes you have to accept that if you don't go you're going to be down some teeth, which is not an exciting prospect.
John did not want to go to the dentist, but he went anyway because he's a trooper like that.
So we were out of bed bright and early at four-thirty a.m., because the free clinic operates on a first-come, first-serve basis, and the doors were opening at six. We'd been advised to get in line as early as possible. No problem. We drove out to downtown Greensboro in the dark deadness of pre-dawn morning, found parking, and shuffled around the outside of the church looking for the clinic entrance.
There was already a two-hour line. Oh, joy. But, goddammit, free dental care is free, so into line we went. It was 34 degrees outside (1.1 degrees C, for you Canucks on my list) and we were freezing our butts off, but we were pretty far up in the line (John and I were numbers 134 and 135, respectively), so we figured the wait couldn't be that long.
Then two hours went by. Our feet went painful, then completely numb. Our breath crystallized on everything. We huddled in our coats and jumped up and down, achieving a spectacular amount of nothing. The gentlemen in front of us in line were from the Sudan, hunched over in their gigantic scarves, saying what I believe was the equivalent of, "Fuck, this country is cold," in Nubian. The ones behind us were from the Elm Street projects and kept spitting a lot (personally, I preferred keeping my spit in my mouth since it was, at least, at body temperature).
The line finally started moving with agonizing slowness while we watched a very uninspiring sunrise leak over the roofs around us. Another forty-five minutes or so went by as we stalled a paltry twenty-five people from the door, because a perky blonde woman with perfectly capped teeth had begun to run up and down the line asking people if they were here for fillings or for extractions. I wanted to keep my tooth if it could be kept, so I told her filling, which turned out to be the wrong answer because everyone who chose extraction was pulled out of the line and hustled past us into the building first. I was seriously concerned that John might erupt into violence after the third pack of people who had arrived an hour and a half after us trundled on by into the heated interior.
But, finally, we made it inside. Huzzah! The dental staff were resigned and didn't object to the fact that it took us almost ten minutes to fill out some very haphazard-looking forms, because we were not the first people to come in whose fingers were not working from the prolonged cold. We went through triage to make sure we didn't have the plague before we were let into the clinic (John has high blood pressure. Surprise), and then had our teeth checked for issues. John was pronounced sound, which we pretty much already knew since he was just there to keep me from being kidnapped while I stood in the line of endless suffering, so he was packed off to get a free cleaning. I obviously had a broken tooth, but there was good news: not only did the examiner believe it could be filled without too much issue (take that, people telling me it would have to come out!), but he also noted that my wisdom teeth had come in without me even noticing, and that as long as I kept taking care of them they shouldn't have any problems at all. Sweet.
And then off--to wait in line some more! Awesome. Again, not complaining too much. After all, I wasn't paying for this. John and I were now in separate lines, but we waved at each other and sent text messages relaying our progress toward the front. Because it was a smaller line with a faster procedure, John not only got to the front first but was actually finished with his cleaning before I even got out of line. He wandered disconsolately around the parking lot waiting for me--for another three hours, much to our unforecasted dismay. As I said, he is a trooper.
The actual procedures, by the way, were done cattle-call-style in a massive gymnasium, in which forty dentists and their assistants had set up large tables with equipment and forty portable dental chairs. It looked like an uncomfortable cross between a morgue and a horror-movie torture chamber (John took a very small picture, here), but, again. Free.
When I finally made it to an actual dentist, a bony little late-forties woman with dark, frizzy hair and a lot of mascara, I was more than ready to get this the hell over with. Sadly, I had to take off John's oversized coat to lie down on the table, which meant that I spent most of the operation trying foggily to keep from shivering and making my head move, because despite the large number of people in the room it was still goddamn cold. There were the usual needles and swabs and more needles and drilling while I tried to think of England, and then I was sent off for x-rays because maybe the tooth couldn't be saved (and let me tell you, being jumped to the front of the x-ray line made a lot of people very displeased with me), and then I was brought back because it turned out it probably could but it was a very near thing and very close to the nerve, blah blah blah, more drilling. There were a lot of drugs in my system by this point, so I wasn't particularly clear, which was probably pretty good since the dentist had inserted some kind of massive clamp in my mouth that left a gigantic metal handle sticking out so that I couldn't have closed it if I'd tried. Fun times indeed.
Then, after putting in a temporary filling (god, please let me have insurance in the next few months before it's shot, love, Anne), the dentist and her assistant were puttering around, trimming its edges off and filing down what was left of the original tooth, when two things happened simultaneously: both of them suddenly went white and wide-eyed, and I started choking as something completely closed off my airway. They both immediately dived for my throat with both hands, getting in each others' way so that I doubt they even got close, and, still choking, I started bucking around until (much to my short-lived relief) my throat suddenly cleared and I could breathe again and set about the business of panicking after the fact.
"What," was all I managed to really say, because I had to stop and say, "Ow. OW," instead and put my hands around my own throat, because something was slicing a painful trail down it from the inside.
There followed this example of D.D.S. franticness:
"Did she swallow it?"
"Oh, my god."
"Did you swallow it? I think she swallowed it."
"It's not anywhere else, she must have swallowed it."
"Shit. It wasn't a flame-shaped, was it?"
"Yeah, it was."
"Shit."
And then all the hardware was out of my mouth with blinding speed, the napkin had been ripped off my neck, and my dentist was propelling me across the building with the kind of nervous energy that only people who are pretty sure they're in deep shit generally have. With dizzying speed and determination, she dragged me around to at least four different people, each time telling them tersely that, "She swallowed a bur," like I had snatched it off her instrument tray and triumphantly ingested it like a naughty toddler. All of the people she told this looked shocked and shifty, and then immediately told her everything would be fine.
I wanted to know what a bur was, especially if one had just gone down my throat, because it kind of hurt and I was getting the impression despite my anaesthetized haze that something kind of bad had just happened. Nobody was interested in talking to me, however. In fact, I didn't find out what a bur was until I got home and cleared my brain enough to look it up, when it turned out that it was a drill bit shaped like an inch-long spear (I'm pretty sure the flame-shaped one is the one on the far right in that picture, with the pointy and the little teeth).
Unfortunately, since there were no x-ray machines on site that could be adapted to use on my torso--they were all for facial x-rays, for obvious reasons--there was a minimum amount of investigation conducted, at the end of which it was declared that it obviously wasn't in my lungs because I wasn't asphyxiating or coughing blood, so it had probably gone down my esophagus and into my digestive tract. My dentist, visions of malpractice insurance premiums dancing in her head, dragged me around to a few more people, all of whom said very carefully that it was entirely possible that it would just work its way out naturally and there was nothing to worry about. And then, looking extremely nervous, she re-drugged me, finished cleaning up my filling, and hustled me out of the clinic. I was advised that I should go get an x-ray at the hospital (again: no insurance, dudes), but that everything was probably fine. Oh, and also, if I started experiencing tearing or stabbing pain anywhere in my guts or started vomiting blood, I should probably also head to the hospital in that case. The assurances that everything was fine were not really backed up by all the continuing dentist panic and the number of people trying to simultaneously tell me that I was fine and that I should probably seek help if I suddenly started dying.
John was not amused, which I'm sure surprises no one. Hazy, confused, and still kind of woozy, we went home and I promptly passed out for fourteen hours after he stuffed some food into me in the hopes of coating the nasty little thing so it would be less pointy. He's been stomping around the room ever since, ranting about lawsuits and emergency rooms, waking me up every hour that I'm asleep to make sure I'm not bleeding out.
Now, forty-eight hours later, it's still in my system somewhere. I have no idea where. There's been mild nausea and discomfort, but nothing I could definitively point to as being caused by a foreign object. John's starting to get seriously worried that it hasn't emerged. I'm not exactly sanguine about it myself. Actually, having a miniature spear somewhere in my body is not conducive to calm at all.
Aaaaand, yeah. That was my weekend.
This is why it took three hours for me to re-emerge from what should have been a fairly normal procedure. |
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