Hays Travelogue

It’s been a weird couple of days for my face.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been feeling like I had something wrong with a tooth, a kind of pressure around it as if I had something to floss out.  But flossing didn’t help.  Then anytime I would get sick, which with me—being a teacher and in Egypt—is pretty often, I would always feel like I had a sinus infection, aching face, headache.  Routine misery, but then I went to the dentist to see about that pressure, and it turned out that I had an infection under a tooth that I’d had root canalled years ago when I got it crowned, an upper molar right under my sinuses.

So a couple of nights ago, I went to the dentist to get it looked again by the senior dentist.  I had an 8:00, but the place was packed mainly with noisy kids playing soccer with a plastic cup and shouting out songs to impress their extended families, all of whom were in line before me.  Finally, at 10:00 I’d had enough.  I told the guy at the desk, two hours is too long.  I’m leaving.

No, please, Mr. Michael, the guy pleaded.  Wait one second.  His intensity surprised me.  In the States, a receptionist would have erased my files before the door had closed behind me.  I waited by the door while he went to the back office.  Within a minute I was sitting in a dentist chair with the main dentist, Dr. Mohamed, fingering around in my mouth, apologizing for the delay.  Lots of surgeries tonight. He held an x-ray from the last appointment up to the light.  The tooth, he announced, must be extracted tonight.  It will take three months to put in an implant, but the tooth must come out now.  It’s very dangerous around the sinus.

I told him I was leaving Cairo in four weeks.  He said, We can put the tooth back in place if it doesn’t break.  A forty percent chance.  Regardless, we have to remove the tooth.  Tonight?  It’s already after 10:00.  How long will it take?  Thirty minutes.

You can pull the tooth, clean the socket and put it back in 30 minutes?  Yes, he said, If it doesn’t break when we pull it out.  If it breaks, you can get an implant when you go to Istanbul.  Not in America, though, he said.  Everything is too expensive there.

Nothing in my years of dental care had prepared me for the violence that my mouth then suffered.  After some local anesthetic and four painful stabs of Novocain, Dr. Mohamed started tugging and twisting at the tooth, wiggling it back and forth with a pair of pliers.  They were chrome plated, so I knew they were dental tools, but a pair of needle nose would have had the same effect.  I felt like a character in a Wild West movie whose tooth was being yanked by the barber or blacksmith.  I should have been soaked with rye.

He popped off the crown easily, but the tooth was another matter.  The roots’ grip was strong, and Mohamed had to throw a headlock over my forehead to stabilize me while he jerked at the tooth.  He got tired, and he called his assistant to take over.  This was a new one for me:  I have never received any kind of treatment, especially from a dentist, that has exhausted anyone but me.  The assistant must have gotten some purchase after a while because he shifted to using a straight pointed tool.  He jammed and pried, wiggled the tooth, and then jammed and pried some more.  I was tense.  I couldn’t help it.  I tried to relax, but I kept imagining that pointed jabber slipping off my tooth and lodging into my jaw or popping through my cheek.  My toes were curling in my sandals, my feet were arching, and I was clutching the armrests of the chair. Then out slipped the tooth.  The assistant showed the bloody prize to the dentist.  Success, Mohamed said.  We can use the tooth.  You can rinse.

I sloshed some water around my mouth and rinsed out strings of blood and gravelly bits of silver.  Then Dr. Mohamed showed me what he had irrigated from the socket, a little blood tinged ball of pus that he rolled on his forefinger like a curiosity.  Several infections, he remarked.  After a few minutes of working on the tooth, cleaning it and putting new tips on the roots, Mohamed was ready to put it back.  He slipped it in the socket and wiggled it into place.  Bite.  I bit.  Too high.  He pushed some more and then hammered upward with his pliers.  Maybe three whacks.  I am carpentry, I thought.  I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. Then with a few more blows, and the tooth snapped into place, intact and as good as new.  He and his assistants chuckled with satisfaction, and he pulled off his gloves.

I was wide eyed and bewildered.  Ahm I dohn? I tried to operate my mouth. Yes, you are done.  You can get up.  In two weeks we’ll replace the crown.  He passed it to me in an envelope.  I looked at my watch.  Twenty-five minutes.

I picked up my antibiotic prescription in the pharmacy nearby and walked home, dazed.  A neighbor kid who normally assails me with overdriven high fives hid behind a car, jumping out to surprise me.  Murmphft, I told him and put out my palm for him to slap.  Nothing could scare me tonight.

The next day my mouth worked despite being sore and raw.  I could manage my classes with my normal mild-mannered finesse and contemptuous indifference.  But at lunch, my face suffered a new indignity.  I was nibbling into an apple, chewing on my good side, when I felt a sting on the inside of my lips on my bad side.  A tiny ant, crawling over the apple, thought I wanted to bite him and retaliated. Within minutes my lips looked like under-inflated bicycle inner tubes.  My cheek swelled up, but loosely, like a sagging water balloon.

Students came in after lunch, and saw that I was holding my face when I greeted them.  What’s wrong, Mister?  I lowered my hand, and some stepped back.  What happened?  I explained, and I joked that I thought it might be permanent.  A geeky kid put his hand on my shoulder.  Don’t worry, man.  It shouldn’t last more than two weeks.

At the end of the day Tam offered to take a photo of me.  I declined.  I told her I looked grotesque.  Like the geeky boy, she reassured me.  You’re not too grotesque.