oral hygiene very good

I’m currently stuck at home for a few days looking like half a chipmunk because I finally decided to remove the wisdom teeth that have been providing seasonal dull headaches for years. Why now and not 7 years ago when the pain started? Cheap and reliable dental care. Although at this juncture I’m starting to doubt the second adjective.

It all started a few weeks ago when Mara and I decided to go to the dentist for a cleaning and I wanted to have someone look at my wisdom teeth. We got a reference for an office whose dentists came from the university where we work, and who supposedly spoke near fluent English. WRONG! Although our visits went very well (no cavities for either of us) our dentist was not so good on the English side. She spoke a little, but could not understand me when I first said wisdom teeth. She was able to communicate that she couldn’t do anything for my third molars, other than show the two erupted teeth to me in a mirror. She then proceeded to blindfold me (very weird) before she cleaned my teeth and told me I had “oral hygiene very good.” She also said “perfect” in Thai, which I hope was in reference to my teeth, but I don’t really know due to the blindfold. I was just happy to understand the Thai.

After a two week recovery from the initial encounter, I went in to make an appointment with the specialist. In order to make sure I got what I wanted across, I had one of the other Thai ajarns at the university write a note for me that said I wanted an appointment with a specialist to look at my wisdom teeth. This apparently didn’t work because they sent me back to the same dentist I saw the first time and she just told me to go to a specialist. I then politely asked her to help me make an appointment with the specialist to make sure everything was clear to the receptionist.

The following day I went for what I thought was a wisdom tooth consultation at 7:00pm. Why that late? No idea. The dentist was nice enough, and her English was pretty good, so I felt a bit more comfortable. She told me she needed an x-ray to see the two upper teeth that had not erupted, and then she told me she could remove the two right-side teeth today. What? Today? Before I could recover from the shock of it, she was sticking a needle in my gums and then sent me off to get the x-ray. When I got back I asked her why we couldn’t remove all 4 today, and she told me that I wouldn’t be able to chew, and that we could remove the remaining two in one to three weeks. She also asked me if I was “excited.” Thai does not have a word for nervous or worried, instead they use excited. Not thinking, I told her I wasn’t very excited. I later realized that was her way of determining if local anesthesia was going to be good enough. Five minutes later, I’m in surgery.

I was blindfolded again (at least this time I was prepared), and took many deep breaths as she wrenched the lower tooth out and closed it with one stitch - took about 5-10 minutes. The upper tooth was not nearly as cooperative. She kept cutting and prying and cutting and prying, clearly using all of her strength as the assistant held my head tightly for leverage. She ended up ripping the side of my cheek open. Finally, after at least 30 minutes, the tooth was free. Turns out the bottom edges of the tooth were outturned, creating a barb that would not allow the gum to release the tooth. It took 4 stitches to close up that upper wound. Before cleaning me up she actually unblindfolded me to show me the crazy angle of the bottom of the tooth.

The local anesthetic was fine for the surgery, but all she sent me home with was Ibuprofen 400 for pain and an antibiotic. The scariest part of everything has been the recovery. It took more than 12 hours for the bleeding to stop, and 72 hours later I’m still swollen like a chipmunk (although considerably less chubby). I’ve relied a lot on the internet for post-op advice (although I know I shouldn’t). Her advice was don’t smoke, don’t spit, eat soft food. She was also trying to explain something about swelling, but she didn’t know the word swelling, so I’m still not really sure.

Through this miserable 3 day (and counting) recovery I’ve definitely felt a lot of frustration for the way everything was handled. It’s one thing to chalk it all up to cultural differences when you have an issue at work, but when you have no time to mentally prepare for surgery, and when you don’t agree with you dentist’s reasoning for why you can’t get all 4 teeth done at the same time (3 days later and my teeth still won’t meet to chew anything), you tend to feel a little hostile, especially since I’m facing the whole thing over again next week when she removes the remaining two teeth and my stitches. At least the bill was nice, only $100 for two teeth, both impacted, one erupted. And that even includes the Ibuprofen!

In the end, I’m mostly just thankful that I speak English. In so many ways I’ve lucked out because everyone here learns English, and I can only imagine how much more horrible the situation would have been otherwise.