It Was Only The Third Dental Clinic

This morning when I woke up, the first thing I remembered was not the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but my appointment for the eighth visit to the dentist's this year. Since I already knew the location of the Community Polyclinic at Durian Tunggal, I only started driving after 8am and reached there five minutes early.

As I was entering the reception, I saw several people at the waiting lounge. At first I thought today was a very busy day. When I showed my visit card and took a seat at the back, I realized only two of them were quiet patients with their mouths covered with masks while the rest were the staff chatting among themselves in front of the television!

I stood up again to look at posters on the wall. I particularly liked one with a slogan "Reduce sweetness in drinks; Add sweetness in smiles." I had no problem to practise that. But to smile sweetly, I must have good teeth. That was why I had been touring Melaka to receive treatments for a decayed molar of mine since last February.

I was called to the dental room very soon and recognized the young endodontist, despite his mask, who had spent almost two hours patiently scrapping my infected pulp out of the root canals during the previous treatment. He asked me if I had experienced any pain since then. Everything had been fine except that the temporary filling had been a bit cracked.

Special big sun glasses were placed on my eyes and rubber sheet on my mouth. This time, the dentist did not inject anaesthetic as the whole procedure was not going to cause me great pain. He only rubbed some cream on the tooth area and removed the temporary filling. He then injected medicines to the root canals.

I was comfortably lying on the dentist's chair facing cute animals stickers on the wall and scary tools hanging on the bracket.

After he had filled the cavity with an inert material made of rubber, the dentist asked an assistant to take a burner. It was a machine which heated up a drill. When he used the hot drill to cut the extra cavity filling, smoke literally came out of my mouth! He finally placed the permanent filling and took an X-ray of the molar. I thought it was the final procedure and was glad that it had only taken about an hour. I was about to thank everybody and get ready to leave when the endodontist said to me,

"After the root canal treatment, your tooth has become fragile because there is no more blood to supply nutrition to it. We usually advise our patients to have a crown to protect the tooth. If you agree, we'll send the impression of your tooth to the lab to make a crown. It'll cost RM135. You'll get it next year. We'll have moved to Ayer Keroh..."

Hoping to keep my smiles sweet for a longer time, I let them put me in the list and started counting down to visit the fourth dental clinic in Melaka in February 2010.