Dentist visit

This morning, as I was eating my bowl of pineapple and banana, I felt a hard piece of something that certainly wasn't pineapple or banana. When I got it out of my mouth, I could see that it was a piece of tooth, and a quick exploration of my tongue verified that a cusp on one of my upper right molars was missing, leaving a sharp edge. It didn't hurt, so I finished eating my fruit, but then after breakfast, and reading my e-mail, I walked over to the same dentist office where Samuel got his teeth cleaned.

When I walked in, the dentist [female] was talking to the receptionist. I explained my problem, they filled out a patient visit card, and before I could ask for an appointment, I was seated in the chair with my mouth open. I asked the dentist if she spoke English, and with a wry smile she said, "Poco", so our conversation was entirely in Spanish. Of course, with drills, picks, cotton wadding, a vacuum tube, and fingers in my mouth, I wasn't exactly talking a mile a minute.

She got busy with the drill first, and cleaned out all the decay. Apparently the cusp fractured where a previous filling had weakened the tooth, and there was a time or two as she cleaned the tooth that I could tell that it was about to hurt, but it never got any worse than that, although my jaw did get awfully tired from being open so wide for so long.

Once she had it cleaned out, she applied some sort of ceramic filling that she cured with a UV light, and after about 45 minutes she was done. It still feels a little rough to me, and I may go back just to get it smoothed off a bit, but it sure feels better than it did this morning.

She cautioned me not to eat for at least an hour, and to be careful about eating anything that was very hard, and we went back out in the front office. I asked what the bill was, and the receptionist said that it was $21. I thought I had misunderstood, so I asked again. She wrote it down and handed it to me. $21. OK. I got out my wallet, gave her $21, got a receipt and left. Dental insurance doesn't seem to be very common down here, but with prices like that, I can see why.

For some reason, I forgot to take pictures while all this was going on, so I don't have any to add to the blog today. However, one other thing happened that amused me. As I was leaving the building, there was a woman, kind of a receptionist for the whole building, who I had greeted as I arrived, and once again I greeted her, in Spanish, as I was leaving, and she replied with, "Buenas Dias," and then added, "Auf Wiedersehen." I'm not sure what my accent sounds like to the natives here, but apparently I don't sound like the standard North American Gringo.