If You Feel Pain by Matthew Menary

There are few things worse than having a toothache in a foreign country when you don’t speak the language. It started with a dull ache in the right lower molar, and the more I ignored it, the worse it got. By the time I decided that no amount of embarrassment, miscommunication, or cost was worth putting things off any longer, I walked into the first dentist’s office I could find, approached the middle-aged woman at the front desk, pointed to my cheek, and said, “Ow!” To my surprise, she understood perfectly and wrote a note on a card that I was able to decipher, telling me to come back in two days at 1500.

“It’s okay?” She smiled and asked.

“Okay! Origato,” I said and bowed and left.

When I returned, the waiting room was full. I slipped off my shoes and put on the spongy grey slippers provided and checked in with the woman at the front desk.  Since there were no empty chairs, I stood with my back against a wall until a patient was called in to the treatment room, and I moved to the chair he vacated. I was so glad to be fixing my tooth that I would have stood on my head if I had to to get in. When my turn came, I was welcomed in with expansive hand gestures and offered the nearest of four dental chairs crowded into a single long room. Each chair was surrounded by many long-armed lights, hoses, and trays while a crowd of heavily masked, capped, and aproned assistants stood by at attention. Once I sat down, four of these mummy-like attendants surrounded my chair. I got the uneasy feeling they were there to restrain me if need be. I thought that if any battle were to ensue, I would surely succumb. 

I am not sure if the overwhelming show of force put me into a submissive frame of mind, but I found myself agreeing to everything. No English was spoken, but with the holding up of instruments, the pointing of fingers, and the agreeable tilt of heads, all I could say was “yes” and “okay.” After a few preliminary looks and pokes into my mouth, things settled down, and it looked as though they were all set. That was when one of the masked mummies leaned over and whispered into my ear, saying in perfect English, “If you feel pain, raise your hand.”

“Okay,” was my too quick reply before the slow realization that the buzzing I was hearing meant that they were about to drill without Novocaine.

I won’t go into detail. All I can say is it hurt, as you might expect, and it went on and on. I got the feeling they would not stop until they were well into my jawbone or through it into my chest. When they did stop, they packed the enormous hole they had drilled with some sort of wadding, invited me up out of the chair, and escorted me to the front desk, where I was instructed to come back in a week. 

Dazed and sore, I almost walked out into the street wearing the dentist’s slippers, and only at the last minute did I remember my shoes. In talking with my Japanese friends later about this two-step process, I found that this was normal, if annoying, and most people thought of it as unnecessary. One person disagreed and explained that it was accepted practice, and there was a good reason to wait before filling a cavity, although he did not explain what that reason was.  

My early experiences at my childhood dentist were rather traumatic, but being young and not knowing better, I just went along with it. For example, at one appointment after a rather rough cleaning, the dentist looked into my mouth with a seriously furrowed brow and said, “Yeah, those can come out,” and he reached into my mouth with his two blimp-like thumbs and push-pulled two of my molars loose and yanked them out with pliers. These baby teeth weren’t loose before, not even a little. I walked out with tears on my cheeks while biting down on two bloody cotton rolls that I was imagining were the dentist’s fat, warm fingers. 

My treatment as a child may have colored my expectations of any dentist, no matter where in the world they might be, so I wasn’t surprised that my experience in Japan that day brought my thoughts right back to my youth. While I still held a grudge against my childhood dentist, I certainly did not fault the Japanese system of diving in without first numbing the tooth because, after all, I could have raised my hand at any time. Why I didn’t, I can’t really say for sure, but it does point to the importance of learning foreign languages, or at least knowing the foreign equivalent of Novocaine and the proper way to form a question.

“Nobokain wa arimasu ka?” 

I’ll be ready next time.