I've been scraping cement out of my mouth throughout the day today. This is a consequence of one of the most trying and scary experiences I've had here since my glorious beginning in Germany.
As the result of about 10,000 Haribo gummy bears, 543 Cliff bars, and 50 Schnitznel, my crown came loose and fell off a few weeks ago. I've been avoiding getting it fixed for a few reasons: One, I could just stick it back in there and it would stay, unless I ate gummy bears. Secondly, the dentist is just never a place you search out when in a foreign country.
But I'm just not the kind of girl who would sacrifice gummy bear consumption for the sake of a crown (who is...?) So I had to go, and everything started out easily enough. It was definitely a euro-dentist. A tiny little receiving area with an extremely nice receptionist, then a waiting room with a coat rack and about 50 chairs shoved into the space for 10. I was feeling pretty confident. All of the sounds were familiar to me...shrill drills and chatty Cathies cleaning peoples' teeth. But then I sat in the chair...
The little bib thing they gave me was literally a paper napkin. Like the kind of thing you might see in a local pizza joint. This should have given me warning of what was to come...
The dentist was like a Chevy Chase character. He sat down with a huge grin and a nice golden tan in the German Winter, then he tilted my head back like they do in cartoons. After shoving his hand into my mouth and commenting on the beauty of my “american” teeth, he went straight to work with the drill. He drilled a little everywhere around my missing tooth, just doing a little archeological work, I guess. I was then instructed to “swish”, but NOT “swallow” some concoction that I saw the nurse pour out of the same kind of brown glass container that I pored hydrochloric acid out of in Chem class. (In case you were wondering, “swish”, “swallow”, and “highly poisonous” are not vocab words that are commonly taught in German classes.) This took a few times for me to understand and then finally I was ready for the GLUE.
Right before that, the doctor told me I would feel a coldness in my mouth, then he continued to swab my tooth with a liquid that smelled identical to nail polish remover. He then argued with the nurse a little about whether the glue looked good enough to use, slapped some on my tooth, then threw the crown in there. After a few bite-fittings, he decided that the crown didn't fit so he drilled the hell out of it for about a minute (whoops, there goes 1,500 for a beautiful porcelain crown) and was content with his job. Finally, he took a tube labeled “TOOTH POLISH” in a cartoon-ish red and green and “polished”. After this I had to “swish” the polish for about 5 minutes until my mouth was no longer red.
Now I understand that there are bad dentists everywhere, which is why I insist on going to my one guy in Charlotte who has memory foam pads and Light 104.9 playing while he does his work. But this guy was especially bad...its not a lie, we've got the good ones over the across the pond. Even though you might only be able to get appointments 4 days a week and pay astronomical prices for a cleaning, you can be glad that you don't have to pick tooth glue out of your mouth for days after a simple procedure.
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