2009: Dr. V

I didn’t mean to stay in Paris more than a couple of weeks, but by the time we were back from Morocco and I’d received the all’s-clear from Dr. V, it was starting to feel like home.

Dr. V is Caroline’s dentist. It seems I have developed a bad habit of cracking teeth every time I leave the country. Actually, this particular tooth had been cracked for a long time. For the most part I experienced it as a mild throbbing of my jaw and head. Being a dentiphobe, I did my best to attribute this symptom to any plausible cause other than the real one… sinuses, allergies, muscle strain, changes in weather, stress. You can blame anything on stress, right? This lasted so long that I eventually forgot it wasn’t normal. Only when I bit down on some tiny thing like a caraway seed or a peppercorn, something small and hard enough to wedge the crack open and expose the unprotected nerve, did the truth scream at me in an undeniable rush of pain. So I avoided seeds, peppercorns and other small, wedge-shaped forms of food. But denial can only last so long when it comes to dentistry.

“If it hurts her, she should go see Dr. V,” Jean-Patrick said. Caroline translated her husband’s instructions but I wasn’t convinced. She had told me about Dr V. How he is such a stickler for time thatshe’s more afraid of being late for her appointment than the fact that he’s going to stick a drill in her mouth. How he has no patience for listening to the nuanced details of his patients’ symptoms. Hmm… like the fact that it has to be something as small as a caraway seed, perhaps, not a sunflower seed?

Caroline’s eyes got large. “Oh no… don’t even begin to talk to him about seeds,” she said. “But, on the other hand, he is very good at finding the problem. And I can promise you that he won’t hurt you. I’ve been using him for years and he never hurts me.”

“Would she rather wait until she gets to Poland?” Jean-Patrick asked. His logic was undeniable. “If there’s nothing wrong with the tooth it will only cost her twenty euros, and at least she’ll know she doesn’t have to worry about it.” I made an appointment the next day.

At exactly 11:30 am the door shot open in Dr. V’s waiting room and he ushered me in, along with Caroline as my translator. He looked around in my mouth for about 30 seconds then said in English, “Is big crack.” He pointed at it with that long, sharp prodding implement that all dentiphobes have nightmares about. “Zis one.” I winced as he pulled on it a little to show Caroline the extent of the crack.

“Oh,” Caroline said in an uninspiring tone. “I can see all the way down. Dr. V continued talking and drew me a picture while she translated. “He needs to kill the root… impression … crown … two or three visits." Oh god. And this was when I discovered the very nice thing about root canals in France. Not that a root canal is ever pleasant, but where an American dentist would be writing me a referral to an oral surgeon at this point, Dr. V was simply scheduling an appointment for the following day.

The extraction was, as Caroline had promised, virtually painless. The root itself looked like an underdeveloped turnip. I was tempted to ask if I could keep it – it seemed odd to just throw a piece of me in the trash like that – but by the time I could piece together how I might say that in French (Caroline had left us to ourselves by now), Dr. V was already installing a temporary tooth that would last until I got back from Morocco. The entire procedure took about 25 minutes in the chair.

Dr. V charges by the appointment, not by the procedure. Twenty euros for a short visit (15 minutes) and forty for a long one (25 minutes). That means that the same procedure that costs around $1,000 in the US and is performed by a specialist, cost me $56 in France and was done in a painless 25 minutes. What a scam the dental industry plays on American consumers!

Two more short visits after Morocco and me and my new molar were good to go. Villemomble was starting to feel like home and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. Allison, Caroline’s twelve year old lover of raw meat and furry cheeses, deserved to have her room back. I went to the bus station on my way home from Dr. V’s office to buy my ticket to Prague. Yes, I did say the bus station. Not the train station. Dentistry may be cheap in France but train travel is not. My vision of riding the rails through hours of mesmerizing countryside would have to wait until I’d made my way further East. I didn’t care. For as long as I could remember, I had always wanted to go to Prague.