Dentists, and Drug Marts!
I don’t like going to the dentist under the best of circumstances, but the thought of communicating with someone using hand gestures, who would end up wielding sharp objects in my mouth, was frightening. Yet, it had to be done. Six months had passed since my last cleaning and checkup, and I am a firm believer in preventive care. Mostly, this is because I am a coward who doesn’t want to handle the physical and financial aftermath of neglect. The time had arrived to take action.
Finding a dentist in Uzbekistan is quite easy. You just need to leave your house, walk one or two blocks in any direction, and you are bound to run into one. Dentists and pharmacies here are more ubiquitous than banks in Switzerland, often set up in rows of 3 or more in one place!
To get legal drugs in Canada one goes to a drug mart and finds, tucked away in the back, a pharmacy. Here an entire store is devoted to this function. In Uzbek it’s called a ‘dárixana,’ and in Russian an ‘apteka.’ And they have lots of them! In fact, as far as frequency goes, the only competition to ‘stomatologia’ (dentists) and ‘apteka’ (pharmacies) would come from ‘Salon Krasoty’ (beauty salons). I call it the Uzbek triumvirate. The logical conclusion would be, then, that Uzbekistan is a country overrun by healthy, well coifed people with impeccable teeth.
I had my choice of two clinics within easy walking distance of our school, both named after Uzbek poets. Is it supposed to boost confidence in the place, with the assumption being that only good things can happen in a place bearing a poet’s name? The Babur stomatologia is right by our favorite pizzeria, and I went there first. It was a short visit. The receptionist spoke no Russian, and there was one customer waiting already, so I headed across the street to the other poet, Berdakh.
The Uzbeks like naming all kinds of places after their eminent people. They are proud of their heritage, and display the pride in a way that may seem unusual to Westerners. Sometimes I run for milk to the Tansykbayev Mix Market, named after a painter, and hopefully I will never need to visit the Timur Cardio Clinic. Canada, being more populous, has more choices to draw from when it comes to naming places. And yet I have never encountered a drug mart named after, say, Margaret Atwood. Ok, she is still alive and productive, so one might argue that this precludes her from having a drug mart bear her name. But, to my knowledge, there’s nowhere a Sir Mackenzie medical clinic or a Farley Mowat hospital either. Why is that? Does the self-assurance come with size? Canada is so much bigger than Uzbekistan. Maybe people in smaller countries need to remind themselves regularly that their heritage and their national pride is just as important as that of the big guys.
The Berdakh clinic seemed perfect. The receptionist spoke Russian and assured me that they could see me right away. She fit the description of 90 percent of women in this country – black hair arranged in a bun, dark, friendly eyes and half of her face hidden under a medical mask. If I ran into her on the street, I would not even be able to say ‘hello’ because I would not recognize her. The hygienist who led me from the waiting area was more memorable, but it might just have been her expression – stern and unforgiving. I like making up stories about people I meet for the first time. Maybe she used to work as a dental hygienist for the military. Dealing with rambunctious young soldiers might lead to a permanent frown, or maybe she has just seen one too many rotten teeth.
Within two minutes, I was sitting in the dreaded chair, looking around. It must have been a newly opened dental clinic. The room was as charming as an army barracks before inspection. The white walls were devoid of any decoration. There were not even the ubiquitous posters of gleaming white teeth next to rotten ones, with the message loud and clear; this is what you can have if you befriend us and this is what awaits you if you neglect your dental care.
The high-pitched whine started and, with it, my spinning thoughts. Did she really understand I was there only for a cleanup? How competent are they? The horror stories I had heard about dental visits started pouring in. The most recent one was from Dadu, who almost swallowed an implant her dentist dropped into her mouth. She ended up choking it out as the dentist stood there, paralyzed with shock. Knowing Dadu, as she was choking she probably had her entire life playing in front of her eyes like a movie, giving her the chance to review where she went wrong, what she could have done better. That’s because she is a bigger person than me. There would be no thoughtful reflection on my life. If it were me in that chair, my mind would go directly into ‘ch-ching’ mode, as in “Ch-ching … if I live, how much of a discount can I get for this mishap?” And as opposed to an American, who would probably already be thinking of suing!
But things were going reasonably well. True, the saliva was trickling down my neck, since the position of the paper bib was not quite right. And, lacking a pair of safety glasses, my eyes got sprayed with something. But who needs eye protection if I can just close my eyes? What bothered me more was the fact that the cute little spittoon bowl did not seem to be functioning yet. It had a plastic bag covering it and I had to lean away from my chair to spit into the bag. There was plenty of room for improvement there. Why not just give the client a bag to hold? That way, I wouldn’t have to lean.
My plans for strategic improvements were suddenly interrupted. The hygienist dug something resembling a mangled raisin out from the crevices of my mouth … something you don’t want to come out of your mouth, definitely not in the company of strangers. She looked at me reproachfully; as if I had just insulted her grandmother. Positioned on the top of her gloved finger she brought the thing close to my face for a better view.
“Plaque”, she announced darkly.
Instantly I was overcome by guilt. How was this possible? I brush my teeth religiously every morning, before every bedtime, and sometimes I even think about brushing them in the middle of the day. I closed my eyes, defeated. The procedure continued with her applying something that made my mouth pucker in a way that a fish does by nature more gracefully. That was a truly novel experience. I didn’t know my mouth could pucker like that.
My teeth all gleaming, I marched out of the room, straight to the washroom. I needed to gargle some water badly. The clinic was unquestionably new. The toilet bowl still had a sticker of Mona Lisa with some Chinese letters around it. But the best part was the toilet paper holder. Resting on it, evidently intended for wiping, was a brochure for some dental equipment. It was one of those manuals rendered in multiple languages. To fit all that text in, the pages were of very thin, smooth paper, a far cry from the newsprint which I had experienced in the washroom at one of the rural schools. I took the brochure and it opened in the middle. Could it be more coincidental? The page was an English version, and it was titled ‘Instructions for Usage’.