Cambodia- Getting a Tooth Pulled Out in Phnom Penh

I had had enough. I was completely driven to the tether of my threshold of pain. This malignant force in my mouth, which initially was only a problem when I ate ice cream or drank ice-cold water, had now, months later, overwhelmed me, and I had no choice but to see a specialist in the area. The pain coming from a molar at the back of the left side of my upper jaw had reduced me to a useless, quivering, slobbering, barely verbal, heavily self-medicated specimen by the time I went out to the dentist.

And I wasn’t discriminate. I howled, hunched and slobbering, into the street from the front of my guesthouse, and sobbed and wailed down the street, searching for an end to this infernal agony. My girlfriend’s helpful advice that it wouldn’t ‘fix itself’ was resounding through my mind, and I respectfully took it on board and appreciated it, as I writhed and shrieked from the back of a tuk-tuk taking me ideally to a dentist.

When I finally got there, I pointed at my mouth and made a RAMBO-like grimace, and was slithering into a plastic-covered dental chair in seconds. Over my harping demands for drugs, the 14 year old assistant was able to look at my teeth, scrape them, painfully spray them with water, and take an x-ray. As the medication slowly went through my bloodstream, I went into a more dependent, romantic mode, and nearly held his face as I asked what we could do.

He came back with radiographic evidence that my tooth was indeed fucked.

“Root canal work no.”

“Is it bad?” I squirmed.

“Too bad. We need extract. Take out.”

“Get it out of my head. Destroy it.”

Another man walked into the room like he was just about to perform his money shot on a porno set. Fumbling around with some instruments, he muttered some things back and forth to the kid who’d been looking at my mouth, and carelessly shot me full of more novocaine. I didn’t complain.

Then he took a pair of pliers in his hands, which I regretfully saw. He stuck them in my mouth and began to wrench the furthest-back molar on the left side of my skull out of its socket. After it creaked and groaned several times, and he even re-positioned himself for more fulcrum, it was finally brought free from my long-suffering, now very drug-addled head.

He dropped the pliers on the little steel tray next to him, and went back to the waiting room to watch more of a Khmer soap opera with his extended family.

With my mind blown, and a new, intense life experience to add to my belt-notches, the kid gave me a piece of paper with prescriptions elegantly written across it.

“How mu-?” I verbally staggered.

“Thirty dollars, sir.”

“Oh shit. I’ve got to go to an ATM, bro. Can you hold onto this and...I come back?”
I pulled out my ATM card, and thrust to him the contents of my wallet, which now contained only an old picture of my girlfriend, as collateral. I raced off to find an ATM to pay him for the extraction. He half-smiled and watched me run off.

The amazing thing was that all the pain was actually gone. Between the anesthetics and the removal of the tooth, I felt like a newborn.

I finally found an ATM, and was really excited to know that I’d been paid for various freelance writing jobs that week, raced back, and put the money in his hands as his (probably) grandparents re-wrapped themselves in blankets for another rousing half-hour of television.

“I love you. Thank you.”

My words were mixed up.

“I love you, sir. Thank you. Eat this in your mouth for the blood.”

I took a plastic bag of gauze from his hand and stumbled out in the street, feeling as redeemed as Saul of Tarsus.