Today I had an emergency filling done for $15, with no appointment and no anaesthetic, in a dentist’s office next door to the club where I was dancing in wrapping paper and snowflakes on Saturday night.
This is a strange and strangely perfect one sentence summary of why I love Laos. But I’m not one for succinct, so I need to back up and unwind this story across a few days.
Sunday Morning: After being out most of the night before with most of the falang in town for the annual 12 Pubs of Christmas (which I, like always, took part in without drinking and with much dancing), I wake up tangled in wrapping paper and blankets on my friends’ couch.
I have gotten approximately four hours of festive but fitful sleep, and two thoughts hit me- one, my VTE BFF Peter is rolling out of the country that day, and I need to meet up for one last brunch, which makes me sad, and two, I need to get out of here to get there. Unfortunately, the gate, like all gates in Vientiane, is high, jagged with security spikes, and locked with a chain. Every other person in the house had also gone out the night before, and all are definitely still asleep.
I decide to wait it out a bit. I slowly drink an entire liter of water and watch two geckos squeak “gecko” at each other on the kitchen wall. I marvel at the hardiness of the skirt, and take some pictures for posterity. I finger comb my sweat coiled hair and consider all the grad school work my Sunday will have to bear for Saturday. As the time ticks on, I start doing hangover calculations and personality assessments as to who would be least annoyed with me for waking them up at 7 a.m.
I eventually hear someone stirring, then walking across the upstairs floor, then clicking into the bathroom. Poor Erica has me lurking outside the door to intercept her on the way back to a warm bed, to instead come downstairs to the damp cold, hunt around the house for the keys which can’t be found, wake someone else up to get the keys, fight with the gate lock like always, and then finally, kindly, let me out of her house. She is shivering, barefoot, with barely opened eyes, but still, as always, a big sunny smile.
I drive home on my motorbike in the sharp morning air, shivering in my thin tank top, my skirt flapping and crackling, shining silver, red, gold, and green in the cold season sun. It reflects down my legs and up my arms and splatters colored light around me on the ground. I am a Christmas disco ball. It’s way too early in the morning on a Sunday for shit like this. A gang of women heading to the morning market, laden with vegetables and rice, point at me and openly laugh. They are bundled up against the respectable chill, and it’s hard to know if they are done in more by the inherent absurdity of my costume or the fact that I am irresponsibly half dressed for the weather.
At every stop light we hit together, I smile back and wave graciously to peals of intensified laughter. They vigorously mime admonitions to put on more clothes to stay warm. I’m happy to be their strange falang encounter on a Sunday morning, and grateful for their concern for my health.
Weird morning Motorbike journeys were a Sunday Staple for me
I pull into my apartment as I have so many mornings, wearing sleep wrinkled remnants of whatever costume I had put together and worn out the night before. My apartment is in a hotel next to one of the first gay clubs in town, and therefore the owners have zero judgment of whatever I get up to. They are a family that accepts adults can do what they want with their nights and it’s not anyone’s business. Agreed.
They open the gate and barely bat an eye as I go fluttershining by, with my garland head wreath twined around my handlebars, and my snowflake ornament necklace sifting cheap glitter down the front of my shirt.
At this point, to be fair, they’ve seen me in lights and leis:
in beards:
(twice):
lots of times in flowers:
and of course an assortment of holiday related school celebration costumes:
So, really, this is nothing out of the ordinary. We chat a bit as I park my bike, and this interaction also involves concerns about my welfare. There are furrowed brow reminders that if I don’t wear a jacket I will get sick (even the street dogs who guard the noodle shop scraps are given shirts to wear at this time of year). To be fair, it was this kind family who kept an eye on me during the tail end of my bout with pneumonia, so their fears as to my frailty are not without cause. I promise them when they see me next, I’ll have one on.
A much needed shower and an hour later I’m down the street for Peter’s last brunch (and I am wearing a jacket, which pleased my landlord as I waved goodbye). It’s attended by several of us all moving a bit slow, talking low, squinting in the light that shows how little sleep we’ve had. We get teary but still talk casually around the sadly commonplace fact of a friend leaving forever, in a way that folds it pragmatically into the inevitable but still elevates the importance of the relationship and the loss of leaving. It’s a balance you have to strike to honor the moment but still be able to keep making friends around here, knowing many are only here for six months to a year.
Before it’s even started it seems it’s over, and then Peter’s gunning off on his splashy vintage motorbike, that distinctly ridiculous engine sound marking his final goodbye. He’ll soon leave the bike, get on a plane, and join the others who populate nostalgic conversations and reminiscences. In six months, I know I will, too (for real this time).
I also know that I won’t really know that he’s gone until I head to Joma Bakery on a weekday lunch and realize he’ll never, ever randomly be there again. There will be no friendly voice, in an Aussie accent watered down by American roommates, calling out “Hello darlin’! Good to see you- pull up a chair.” I won’t get to hear about the stories he’s working on for the newspaper, or talk about philosophy, or share memories of all the people we knew the year before who have already left. I’m tired and already a bit weepy and sentimental, so I head home.
I do what I always do when sketching out the shape of emotions- I try to write something about it. Instead, I find that everything is sliding on the screen? That’s weird. I’m dizzy and hungry, but I just ate? Why am I cold when it’s not cold? Oh. Oh. I’m sick.
The rest of Sunday is a blur and grad school work goes down the drain along with most of my insides.
Monday Morning: I am still a flaming ball of food sick and or virus but who really cares, the end result is awful and fevered. I can’t be certain of what it is, but I do know that it feels a lot like the souvenir I brought back from Cambodia last year, when I enthusiastically sampled delicious homemade tofu made with local water in buckets, pressed on rocks by hand. I lost ten pounds and all my coworkers diagnosed me with worms (and gave me their extra tablets in solidarity). So, you know, not great.
In between the naps filled with watery limbs and cold chills, plus jarring bathroom dash alarm clocks, I use my laptop as a heating pad on my belly. In spite of gut induced delirium, I have to confirm some last minute details for my upcoming winter break trip, which I am wholeheartedly “I mean… I hope it will be fun, or…whatever” about. That feels ungrateful, and definitely looks ungrateful as I see it on the page.
Let me just say after a year and a half of living in Laos, I have seen my lifetime’s share of backpackers behaving badly. I need a break, and in my efforts to avoid the “Banana Pancake Trail“, planning travel involves a level of leg work, local recs, and piecemeal translations across random websites and forums. Thus I am trying to nail down dates for early morning rubber plantation tours and a week’s worth of private aerial classes and kayak tours whose price point (more expensive than a bucket of liquor or a toastie at 7-11) ensure I won’t overlap with gap year bros in singlets on this trip. I am just not up for any of this when grad school backlogs and food poisoning (viruses? who knows?) are kicking my ass.
So, I confirm things I hope are right, send my credit card details to various websites I gave a cursory check with a fever addled faith they seemed legit, but decide in the end actually I don’t care, steal my money if you want. I surrender the rest of my day to the mercurial whims of my stomach. Grad school work doesn’t have a stomach or a sense of empathy for me, so it dutifully doesn’t take a day off and continues to pile up.
Monday Night: Here’s where the relevance of the second section of that long title gets activated.
I can’t eat for over 24 hours, but when I finally break my fast, I manage to crack a filling.
I crack that filling on, of all things, soggy crackers and soup.
Then I barf up the soggy crackers and soup.
After that I cry because my tooth hurts and I am still hungry and still sick and no one but me can book this trip or do this grade school work or be sad about my friend leaving, and now I have to find a dentist for me, too.
I post a request for a dentist on Buy and Sell Vientiane, which means that within about five minutes every single foreigner in town knows that I need a dentist, which is both useful and strange.
My stomach is killing me, my tooth is throbbing, a crucial train leg remains unbooked, and I want more than anything to eat but my stomach is saying no in no uncertain terms. So, since I can’t do anything about any of that, I go to sleep.
Tuesday Morning: I wake up still feeling somewhere on the spectrum between garbage dump and compost heap, but I drag myself to school anyway because as any teacher knows, the backlog of work from being out sick is not worth staying home to wait until you are actually better. My students are epic, as usual- they really suit up and show up when I am a miserable sack of myself, and their empathy makes me happier than any spelling test or correct grammar ever could.
All day I worry that chipped filling with my tongue, feeling tentatively relieved that my co-worker has assured me that the dentist I was recommended is gentle, cheap, safe, and clean. I like all of those adjectives when you put them together in a descriptive list of someone who will drill holes into my mouth.
The location, down the street from the best cheesesteak in town, next to the much loved CCC Bar, and across the street from the western themed pub where the waitresses wear cowboy hats and reference all things Texas, also seems propitious.
I indulge in omens I don’t believe in as a sign that all will be well.
I end the day haven’t not puked or otherwise expelled my late lunch, which leaves me feeling inordinately cocky and full of life and optimism.
I head downtown to complete the final task on my vacation I still don’t know if I even want to take, and I manage to get the last train out of Suratthani on January 1st. Although it is fan only and the windows don’t open, I feel like I won the lottery.
And then it’s off to the dentist.
Tuesday Afternoon:
The dentist’s office is casual in way that is refreshing, in a way I didn’t now I needed from a dentist’s office, but it’s working (so far) against my vigorously thumping anxiety, so I’m not questioning it. It’s neat and tidy, slightly careworn, some chipped paint here and there, but altogether it’s spotless. In the absence of the hyper hygiene theater I am used to, it feels mundane to the point of being calming, like going into your grandma’s living room to hang out instead of getting your face drilled.
The receptionist is no-nonsense, speaks English at a rapid fire, and walks me through a slip of paperwork in Lao. She leads me to a chair that is immediately behind her desk. It’s unassuming and out in the open, like a well worn recliner in said living room, which again inspires comfort- I can pretend I’m not even at a dentist, since nothing around me really looks like it. Plus, I don’t have any other options, as I’m told this is the best, so I choose to believe that is true because it has to be.
I’m turned over to the competent hands of the well recommended dentist. She pokes and scratches gently, asks a few questions, and says I need a new filling but it should be small. We’re all good on the familiar social script thus far. And then she comes at me, with no explanation, with the drill. She says nonchalantly “I will start now. Tell me if it hurts and I will stop.”
I immediately lose my “No big deal, getting dentistry done in a living room vibe on a random side street sandwiched in between falang bars in Laos is FINE” cool. My anxiety is all too happy to finally fully take over in protest. A step has been missed- where, excuse me, is my shot? How is there a drill without a shot?
I’m shaking. I’m covered in flop sweat. I’m embarrassed that I might be offending the dentist. I start imagining having to take the bus to Thailand and figure out my mouth. I have to try not to cry, which feels like a childish overreaction and embarrasses me further. I want none of this to be happening.
The receptionist, upon hearing my irrational desire to overturn a professional’s judgment, pops around the corner- I forgot to tell you, she is wearing a jaunty kind of fedora that gives her a spunky, listen to me vibe. She assures me that the shot will hurt more than the drill so it’s not worth it.
What. Are . You. Saying.
I do not believe this. I am unconvinced, to the point where I am actually clamping my hands over my mouth and shaking my head.
Do. Not. Want.
The receptionist laughs and realises I might need a bit more persuading. She attempts to do this with a step by step statement that seems more horrifying when you lay out the details: “The dentist just needs to drill out the broken filling down to where it’s cracked, and then make a new hole, and then clean it out for the new filling. If it starts hurting really bad, we’ll give the shot. But it’s really not worth doing a shot for until we know if it will hurt you.”
You don’t say? Just, not WORTH it, huh? Okay, I’ll play this game called “Assume a Drill Won’t Hurt Until it Does: A Tooth Adventure for Two Players”. A part of me wants to test this theory just to see what happens, because hopefully it means everything will be taken care of right now, and not at some amorphous future date on the other side of a bus ride and the border to Thailand.
I throw up my hands (literally and emotionally at this point), open my mouth, and submit my tooth to the drill.
One time, in therapy, my counselor gave me the mantra “100% of the time, my anxiety has been wrong.” I think of this as I realise the receptionist was right. Yes, it hurts sometimes, it is definitely uncomfortable the entire time, I look forward to it being over, but here we are.
This is charming and novel, and I focus on the attentive eye of the dentist, an ink black pupil shining in a circle of brown reflecting the inside of my mouth. It’s over very quickly.
I am astonished, sitting there in that chair, already looking back on my few minute’s past self with a condescending “You wanted a shot for this? Amateur.” feeling.
I apologise profusely to the dentist for having a panic attack meltdown in her chair. I stand up and see that my entire body has left a sweat stamp, a damp fear portrait from head to toe. I apologise for that, too. The dentist is as recommended- gentle. She pats me on my (still sweaty) shoulder and says I did a good job. I tell her she did a good job, too, and thank her again.
When I check out, the receptionist grins at me in an unabashed “I told you so” tone, her fedora authority vindicated. She gives me my shockingly cheap bill, and says “It’s funny, people from over there always think you need a shot. Most of the time you don’t. The shot hurts more than the drill, but everyone is used to the shot. It’s easier to be a bit uncomfortable and get it over with faster.”
So I write to you now, in the present moment, with that brand new $15 filling, and in my head I’m applying what that receptionist said as a profound bit of every day wisdom that I think we can all learn from (and hey, you don’t have to go to Laos, dance all night in wrapping paper, get food poisoning from your friend’s going away brunch, chip a tooth, and then get dental care during a panic attack- you can just read this from the comfort of wherever you are).
Numbing things usually does hurt more and take more time than just being uncomfortable and dealing with it- feeling it all, even the pain. Numbing pain seems like a great way out until you realise it isn’t selective loss of sensation. You might lose that pain, but you lose everything else that isn’t pain. Is that really for the best, in the end?
It’s a binary choice- off or on. Feeling or not feeling. You have to say yes to all of it without knowing any of what’s going to come at you. You have to do that because saying no is worse.
Living overseas alone involves a lot of just doing things, throwing myself into situations headlong, without any prior preparation or scripts to follow, and almost never with a plan. I get randomly sick, from food poisoning to unlucky illnesses to pneumonia to who knows what else. I struggle with my brain, because I would anywhere. People I love often leave, and I often leave people I love, and relationships in general shift like sand and it’s hard to keep a firm footing.
I find myself in uncomfortable new situations, having to trust in things because they are all I have to trust in, having to suspend my preconceived judgments, expectations, or fears. I have to sit with being overwhelmed, or embarrassed, or totally alone, feeling like I’m doing everything wrong, as I fumble to figure it out.
It can feel so incredibly vulnerable to go at these things with nothing between me and them but blind faith that it will be just fine. But on the other side, 99% of the time, I am just fine. I like those numbers. It’s a worthy gamble. I’ll keep playing.
Originally published December 16th, 2014 on Blogger.
Update December 2020: Since then the same filling has been cracked and replaced in Thailand (while I was waiting on a test to come back for a scary diagnosis), Sweden (cracking my first day of work at a job I felt way in over my head for), and then the entire top half of the tooth sheared off the first week of the quarantine lockdown here in Kazakhstan. Impeccable timing, in all instances, as you can see. It is, of all teeth, a wisdom tooth. Maybe it’s a little reminder to embrace struggle- a tiny, insistent Stoic in my mouth, chirping about how the obstacle is the way. Somehow a personified wisdom tooth who lives in my face solely to periodically impart reminders of ancient philosophies at terribly (thus perfectly) timed intervals seems like the only true and logical explanation.
