My war with the dentists continues. For those of you not aware of this, I touched on it some years back right here on Dublin's World: http://dublinsworld.blogspot.com/2010/11/soul-of-dentist.html
My latest run it with the Dental Establishment came about because of my wonderful teeth grinding habit. Due to anxiety and stress I grind the hell out of them while I'm sleeping to the point that it is effecting my jaw and the only means to battle it is a special mouth guard (doesn't that sound relaxing? Sleeping with a chunk of plastic in your mouth?)
A few years ago, after going through a long and torturous experience with a Dentist from Hell (actually Tehran, but who gives a shit), I found a new dentist and explained the whole mouth guard situation to him. This new dentist then counter explained that before getting fitted for a mouth guard I would first need a couple of caps, my wisdom teeth out, and a redo of everything the Dentist from Hell had done. This wasn't good news to say the least but who was I to argue? I hadn't spent numerous years and pissed a ton of money away to get through dental school. I wasn't a "doctor" (I wish with all my heart that I could type those quotes four times bigger so I could mock the bastards just a little more).
I mean really, how unimaginative do you have to be to decide that you're going to be a dentist? And don't tell me the line about "wanting to help people". These people are sick and greedy, there's no "help" or charity involved. Regardless of the money, who wants to spend their days up in people's mouths, scraping and gouging with metal instruments? I would say: the same people that took part in the Spanish Inquisition 500 years ago; sick psychopathic freaks.
Back to my current battle: a year goes by and various projects are performed on my mouth, not by the new dentist himself but his many assistants and other doctors that lurk about the office after being recruited from various dark corners of Eastern Europe. Not only do they have thick accents but they all seem to mumble for some reason and that’s only when they speak. Mostly they are silent. They don't explain what it is that they're actually doing, forcing you to drag everything out of them. It's MY mouth! I've made money with this thing you lazy marble mouthed morons (and not on the street you sick bastards).
This last time was the worst. I was supposed to come in and have a crown put in that had been prepped a few weeks before. The procedure was supposed to take thirty to forty minutes and due to my own shitty schedule, it had to be done on a Saturday.
I come in around noon and one of the "doctors" from beyond the Iron Curtain goes to work on it with a couple of her dickish assistants. It's the weekend and no one wants to be there. I choose to keep my resentment on the downlow, hiding it behind a thin mask of false cheer while the german dentist and her assistants hide nothing, answering my questions with short curt replies, their faces permanently sour with carved frowns.
The German then pops the temporary and attempts to insert the new cap, pushing and shoving it between my remaining healthy teeth. Her breath is bad, pumping point blank into my face. The cap doesn’t fit at all, it was either made by someone who didn’t know what they were doing or, more likely, the German doctor and her assistants have grabbed the wrong cap and are trying to apply it to the wrong mouth. She tries to grind it down to make it fit but it’s no good. This goes on for forty five minutes until I suggest that they insert another temporary and order another cap.
“No, no, no,” she mumbles through a thick cloud of breath. “It vill verk. It vill verk.”
She grinds it down ten or fifteen more times, an hour and a half now gone by, then she disappears. Forty five minutes pass in which I make phone calls and send texts cursing her and all her fellow dentists. I take the opportunity to go on Yelp and pull up the dentist, just to see. There is one yellow star marked with ten reviews, all negative. Not only are there mentions of bad attitudes and shoddy work, some also make claims of impropriety regarding the bills and rates. One reviewer goes as far as saying the main dentist is a criminal and that his brother’s practice is being shut down one town over due to charges of fraud.
I’ve got to say, I don’t use Yelp much at all, maybe once or twice a year for a restaurant, but this makes me a believer. I am going to Yelp the shit out of everything now. Here I am, in the middle of a negative experience, and I’m able to go on-line with my phone and read about others that have gone through the same thing. Granted, it does me little good at this point. If I had Yelped these bastards in the first place instead of just choosing them because they were a block from my apartment, I could have saved myself a lot of time and money.
The german woman finally did come back an hour later and said she would have an assistant stick another temporary in because the cap wouldn’t fit. I was too angry to reply. After waiting for nearly a minute for me to say something, breathing hard and filling the air around us with her putrid breath, she just walked off. The assistant, an ugly girl with fat wrists but better breath, stuck the temporary in and I left immediately, four hours after first showing up.
That was two weeks ago, tomorrow I have to return to that hell hole and have the cap put in, only because they already have my money and I feel it’s a bad idea to change horses mid-stream in the middle of a dental procedure (I haven’t used that term since the 2004 Election!). After that, we’re finished. I’m going on Yelp and I’m going to find me a nice dentist that’s close to my home and see’s me as a human being, not a single man with a steady income that they can milk for years because I neglected my teeth through most of my twenties. I may be just another asshole but they have no soul.
In conclusion, no matter how friendly or skilled or professional the next dentist is, and no matter if they earn my respect or not, they will never earn my trust. They are still a dentist and you must never lose sight of that.
-03-15-13
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