The Dentist

Last weekend one of my worst fears came true, a cap on one of my teeth fell off and left me needing to rely on Malawian dental care. It wasn’t causing me any pain and I was very tempted just to ignore it but knowing that would be foolish and by summoning a little courage I booked an appointment at the local clinic for that Thursday.

Like most things in Malawi I found the dental clinic at the end of an unmade dirt track, the building looked ordinary enough and from the car park at least I couldn’t hear any screams of pain. Feeling pretty nervous I stepped inside to an empty waiting room with a reception desk in one corner. Business must have been fairly slow as the woman there instantly knew who I was and asked me to fill out a questionnaire.

Moments later and quite unbelievably on time my dentist appeared. She was young, Brazilian and very friendly looking which immediately made me feel much more relaxed. She led me through to the dental surgery which seemed very clean and much like one you would find in the UK, this settled my nerves further still.

Just as I was beginning to unwind a Malawian chap in a lab coat that looked twice as nervous as me entered the room and announced in broken English that he’d be assisting the dentist. It soon became apparent that the nervous dentist’s assistant was new to the job and hadn’t worked with this dentist before, in fact I suspect he was a student. Every time the dentist turned to ask for an instrument the poor guy would have the wrong thing in his hand, then he would drop the right thing on the floor and have to go re-sterilise it. At one point while leaning over me with the photo-cure gun he actually fell off his stool and landed on top of me!

The dentist was not a whole lot better. A full ninety minutes I was in the chair! She spent an hour building up my broken tooth until it was roughly the size of Kilimanjaro, only to then spend another thirty minutes filing it back down again! In her defence she was also child minding the nervous assistant and battling with poor equipment at the same time. The high pressure hose on her drill kept flirting off and making a sound like a gunshot; I’d jump, she’d jump and the assistant would fall off his chair. At one point she had hurt my gum and asked if I wanted anaesthetic, dreading the thought of either of them coming towards me with a needle I’d said without hesitation “you know what, it’s actually not that bad”

About forty five minutes into the proceedings the dentist turned to the nervous assistant and said

“I need more B2”

“we don’t have” came the response

“B3?…  B4!?”

In the end my new tooth ended up looking like a top deck chocolate bar with the top being a noticeably different shade of white than the bottom but to be honest at that point I just wanted to be out of there

Eventually the dentist was satisfied with her masterpiece. She asked me if it was still too high and I lied saying it was fine, I think she suspected I was fibbing but we were both tired and her next patient (victim) had already been waiting thirty minutes so she let me go.

Remember to brush your teeth kids…