But when Brandon came home from work one Friday and mentioned that his tooth was hurting and then woke up Saturday with it hurting even more, I knew that our streak of good luck had ended. He took a lot of pain medication to get through the weekend and Monday morning visited with the med unit to discuss who to see about teeth.
Dushanbe had one dental clinic that was sometimes okayed by the med unit and sometimes banned by the med unit (the issue was sterilization of instruments), so I wasn't sure what Tashkent had to offer. The FSHP recommended a place to get the tooth checked out, but cautioned Brandon about getting anything too drastic done. "You should be okay with a filling or a cleaning, but I probably wouldn't recommend a root canal. That should probably be done in London. You're never quite sure how good they are at those things here."
Brandon called the clinic and he was able to get an appointment for that day. He made it there after some hairy driving (turns out that Google maps is a lot less useful when it doesn't give directions) and met the dentist.
Brandon has been speaking Russian for two decades, but he was happy that dentist spoke English. The funny thing about foreign languages is that that you learn vocabulary based on what you need it for. So he knows lots of Russian terms about religion and labor issues, but knows no words for things like horseback riding or dentistry. He stayed very far away from any dentists' offices in Ukraine; one of the branches on his mission met over a dentist's office and they would often hear the children screaming while they were meeting on Sundays.
So when the dentist led off in English, he was happy to continue chatting with him in that language.
"So, what is the problem?" the dentist started out.
"Well, my tooth is hurting."
"All the time? Or only when you eat?"
"All the time."
"Sounds like you've got pulpitis. You're probably going to need a root canal. Mind if I take a quick look?"
Brandon got into the chair an opened his mouth so the dentist could look over his painful tooth. The dentist prodded, poked, and then pulled out a needle. He poked Brandon with the needle, started some serious digging, and then pulled out an even longer needle. Before long the digging turned to drilling, and the dentist was no longer taking a quick look.
Later, Brandon told me that he knew by that point that he was halfway to getting a root canal. He also knew that the med unit had told him specifically not to get a root canal in Uzbekistan. But, as he told me later, "What was I supposed to do? They had my mouth wrenched open, I had been poked by several needles, and the drill was making some serious inroads into my tooth. It's not like I could hop up, thank them for their time, and make a quick getaway. So, obviously, I stayed and got a root canal. Maybe if we had been speaking Russian, the dentist would have been able to communicate better, but it was too late to worry about language differences."
I know that root canals can be quite expensive - thousands of dollars in the US - so I took a deep breath before asking him the bill.
"Now remember, this is just for the root canal," he cautioned me, "I still have to get the filling and crown done." When he told me the total - 118,000 som - I did some quick calculation and came up with $148. Not bad, considering. Then I did another calculation and realized that I had the decimal off - it wasn't $148, it was $14.80. It cost less than getting McDonald's for our entire family.
Brandon still had two more appointments before he was restored to full dental health, and in the end he had to lay down a whopping 594,000 som for a root canal, filling, and crown. With the exchange rate, it ended up being $74.
So we'll see how the root canal ends up long term. A few weeks out, Brandon is feeling fine, so I figure it's working out pretty well so far. And at $74 a pop, we can probably get it done again if we need to.
1 comment:
My root canal in USA cost us $800+. That's with a good, HIGH dental insurance option (!!!).
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