Under the terms of my "benefits," I can finally get some much needed dental work done. Unfortunately, I do not get to choose my oral pain meister. He turns out to be a Chinese gentleman who seems more than competent on first impression. After the inevitable round of x(c)rays, the Doctor gives me his diagnosis.
"It looks like you gonna need some loot canal in sevel of you teet."
Having never had root canal therapy, but having heard of same delight, my first flash is the Medieval Inquisition.
"How bad is it?"
"Not as bad is it could be, consideling. You should think about it as if it well a cledit cald. Now it's time to make some payment. Hah, hah."
When people make such atrocious jokes, usually at my expense, I feel a somewhat masochistic impulse to laugh with them. True to form I laugh like the fool I feel I am.
"Well, how much is it gonna cost me?"
"I do my best, it not gonna cost too much, maybe a couple a thousand. You need at least foul done."
"Say, what exactly is root canal?"
"It is thelapy for tooth that has been infected at its loot. We dill thlough to de loot and put in special post."
"Is that like MacDonald's "special sauce?" I keep imagining this guy with a sledgehammer in his hand over my gaping vulnerable orifice.
"Is it painful?" As if I don't already know and have not already heard from other sufferers.
"It is the pits! I wish they had simply pulled it."
"No, not painful at all. No worse than slight headache." Yeah, I bet they said that to Marie Antoinette too.
"Does it have to be done right away?"
"The soonel the bettel."
"So when should I see you?"
"How bout next week same time?"
"No problem."
Same time next week I am back in the chair, sweating gallons from my palms. The drill is wailing against my tooth like the fat lady at the end of an opera. His pretty chinese assistant stands by like a Cabbage Patch Kid angel of death. I can sense that something has gone wrong fron their tones of voice, but my Chinese is not what it could be, so I can make precious little sense of the babble that constitutes their exchange.
Despite the fact that I have had three syringes of Novocain and cannot feel myself blink my eyes, I know exactly where the tooth involved is located. Just follow the screaming drill.
They take out an electrical device I call a painometer and perform mysterious measurements. Is it my imagination or is he turning into Bela Lugosi? "You feer anything in tooth?"
How the hell am I supposed to answer anything with my mouth gaping like a piranha at steak tartar? I try to grunt no.
He babbles with the nurse a bit more, and then looks down at me.
"I think this gonna take longel than most. This is an especial difficul tooth."
"Okay."
"Come back two weeks, okay?"
"Sure."
Four months, ten visits, and two roaring infections in the afflicted tooth later I am still incarcerated in the chair with with Doctor Pang driving the largest root canal pin in his extensive collection into the root of Dante's ninth circle tooth.
He takes out the painometer and announces with glee, "We finally clean out the infection."
"Thank God," I grunt in return.
"Good. Now we seal it up fol good."
I smell burning solder and try not to think about what this must look like.
"Now we put in tempoaly filling." I have an image of a paint spatula full of putty.
"Wait at least thlee owls bofole eating." Yeah, like I am thinking about running out and ordering a seven course steak dinner right this moment.
"No pollem," I garble through a maze of Novacaine, drool and agony. I can't wait till the painkiller wears off.
"You need forrow-up meeting next week. Same time next Saturday okay?"
"Um-hum."
"You bill is Eleven hundle dollahs, payable in cash, check, ol Mastlecald." I pay him in hard earned cash because my benefits pay me eighty percent of the cost after payment of the bill. Nevertheless, I scarcely begrudge it because I finally have what I want, peace of mouth if not of mind.
As anyone reading the newspapers knows, peace is a very fragile entity in our troubled times, and my version of it proves to be no exception. Three weeks after my follow-up visit, I feel an unpleasant pimple(c)like swelling just above the tooth whose significance I know from frequent, grim experience. My response is as reflexive as that of any trained elephant.
"Doctor Pang's Office, howl may I help you?"
"I think I've got an abscess developing in the tooth the doctor worked on. Could I please talk to him?" While I still can.
"Hold please." The background music happens to be Feelings, the all-time favorite of musicians everywhere. If I were within twenty feet of its composer and had ten minutes alone with him/her, I would be looking at a no bail situation over at Rikers myself.
"Doctor Pang here."
"Uh, Doctor, I think there is some kind of a problem with the tooth you worked on. It feels like there is something still inside, maybe an infection."
"Impossible. The tooth is completely dead."
"But doctor, I feel a lot of pain."
"Don't worry, that will pass."
"But doctor, there is a lot of swelling, my upper left cheek looks like I have a golf ball in my mouth."
"Hmmm. That could be ploblem."
"It sure feels like one. Could you phone in a prescription to my local drugstore for an antibiotic?"
"Yes, because I will need to see it aftel the swelling go down before I can figure out what to do with it."
"Thanks a lot doctor."
A week later I am back in the chair after a miserable week of trying to teach through a mouth that is like a Marine obstacle course.
"This hurt?"
"Uh-uh."
"How about this?"
"Uh-uh."
"How about this?"
"YUUUUUUUUUH! Das it!"
"Hmmm. Interesting. Nulse, get the painometer. We need to take mole X-lays."
After taking another set of X-rays, I go into the waiting room until they are developed. The magazines are the usual round of celebrity slop and cute trained animal stunts.
"Mistah Scanlon?"
"I'm still me." Although sometimes I might have other preferences.
"Come on back in."
I go back to the now too familiar place on the chair of doom, wonder when they are going to put a special inscription thereupon bearing my name, and await my sealed, miserable fate. Pang enters, clucking and cackling.
"Vely intelesting. Okay, dis is ploblem. You have vely unusual culved loot. I have go in again. Heel, look, see it?" I carefully look at the X-ray, and see nothing but the pitiful remains of a human tooth. However, upon closer inspection I observe that perhaps it does curve slightly to the left.
"I did not see it on first set of X-lays, so I no chalge you except what you alleady pay." That sounds reasonable, so I acquiesce, and anyway the job pays for this.
For the next three months I go in and see the Doctor. The procedure and outcome proceed with a hideous sameness. He sticks even longer probes into the tooth that will not die with futile effect. According to the painometer the tooth is not even there, but this denies the evidence of even my untrained eyes.
There is an ominous cloud on the horizon. In the great tradition of anyone involved in the Judicial apparatus, I usually grab a Chinese take-out lunch, Chicken Kung-Pao being my usual "special" of choice. As I spoon in my hot and sour soup I notice a strange tingling in my upper left cheek bone and a stuffy discomfort under my jaw. I go to a mirror and the face that looks back at my inspires more panic than Godzilla in rush hour Tokyo. My lymph glands under my jaw are exploding! With trembling fingers I call the doctor.
"Oh, don't wolly bout that is just slight infection." Well then by God I'd hate to see a massive one, and this is worse than any I have had before.
"I phone in plescliption fol it."
As I walk over to the pharmacy I can feel the swelling already begin to go down, but my anxieties are not diminishing with that. I reflect on the fact that this is the third time in less than half a year that I have been on antibiotics, each time going through a double score, and the dosage has been upped each time as well. While I am waiting for the scrip to be filled I decide to make discreet inquiries.
"Who usually has to take this kind of antibiotic on a regular basis?"
"Either people with a chronic infection, or AIDS patients."
Well cheer me right up! I rush home with the medication and study the insert. There it is. Routinely prescribed for people with AIDS, ARC, and Vincent's disease. Repeated swollen glands, the prescription of doom, agony in the mouth. It is all settling in with paranoiac clarity. I'm a goner.
By the time I rush home to look all this stuff up in Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, a must for renegades and hypochondriacs everywhere, I am cheered to find that the swelling has already somewhat subsided.
The next weekend I am in the chair, and the doctor puts on his serious face.
"I aflaid we have lost the tooth. Need sulgical extlaction."
"Oh boy. What's it gonna cost?"
"I no chalge. It big job, but I made mistake, so I do fol nothing."
"What's a surgical extraction?"
"Not enough tooth to glab, so I filst bleak it into three or four parts, then remove. We schedule next week."
"Okay, same time next week? I'm beginning to feel like a TV show here. Same time, same station."
"Hah, hah, vely funny."
Back at my girlfriend's house the inevitable tooth enters our conversation.
"How did it go at the dentist's?"
"The way it always goes. I rated eleven on the ten step painometer profile."
"So what's he going to do?"
"He says it needs to be surgically extracted, whatever the hell that means."
"I don't like the sound of that at all. Are you sure you don't want someone else to do it?"
"Just how the hell can it get any worse?"
"I don't know, but he seems pretty damn good at coming up with ways. I think you ought to take your father's advice and let someone else work on it."
"Fer crying out loud, I do not feel like hauling my butt all the way out to New Jersey for a job I'm beginning to feel like doing with a pair of pliers, a doorknob, and some strong string. I tell you my tool box is looking better by the minute."
Despite my jaunty airs, I am getting worried. Somehow I cannot help but think that Doctor Pang is about as qualified to perform any "surgical" procedure as a gorilla would be to do open heart work. As the appointed day approaches, I find myself developing increasing misgivings. Finally I knuckle under and go with the Jersey guy. It turns out he is an extraction specialist. I give him Pang's X(c)ray of my tooth.
"Well, take a look at this, he left part of a broken dental instrument in your root!"
"Is that where all these infections are coming from?"
"Sure is."
"Can the tooth be saved?"
"No way. It should have been extracted months ago. He never should have done a root canal anyway."
"Is the root that badly curved?"
"No. It should have been pulled in the first place, that's all. That tooth is a goner."
"Is this a surgical extraction?"
"No way. It has simple extraction written all over it."
He dopes me up with Novocain.
"Do you want some liquid valium with that?" As casually as if he were asking me if I would like some milk with my coffee.
"Forget it. Just pull it and get it over with."
"Okay. Does this hurt?" I hear a sound like somebody stapling concrete and a dull thump.
"Just some pressure. Go right ahead and get started."
"Can't do that. I just finished." He gives me a packet of surgical gauze. "You'll need this for the bleeding. Call my office for a follow up appointment."
"How much do I owe you?"
"A hundred twenty five dollars."
"No problem."
"Pay my nurse up front."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
As I leave the office I cannot help but ponder how much I would like to see that stinking Pang locked up for putting me through all that just for an extra thousand bucks. I take out a copy of my records and a calculator. According to the silicon chip he got the equivalent of sixty dollars an hour. Maybe we really are locking up the wrong people. I look forward to having a tooth farewell party as soon as I get my benefits check.
Three weeks later I get a call from the benefits office to the effect that since the root canal was an inappropriate procedure, I would get nothing. BACK TO THE CONTENTS