Covid-19 saved me $2000 and a lot of pain.
I was at the dentist when my phone buzzed with a text: “we’re bringing ND home. Game cancelled because of the virus.” He had been looking forward to playing high school baseball for so long and it looked as if they would not be playing again after only one game.
It wasn’t good news at the dentist either. My painful molar was abscessed and needed a root canal.
Already, I had little to do as every single booking with my travel company Adventure-Cambodia had been canceled. Now I checked my email to see that Little League baseball, which I was coaching, was also canceled.
And then school was canceled.
And then my dentist appointment was canceled.
So not all bad news as I had an excuse to avoid the dreaded dentist. To me the dentist drill is what firecrackers are to a dog. Settling into the dentists chair, with its rotary arm loaded with terrifying steel tools of torture, I feel like a condemned man getting strapped into the electric chair. Covid was like a minute til midnight call from the governor setting me free.
But now, after nearly six months of reprieve, I must face the drill music and sit back in the chair. One difference though: I am in Albania and the cost is $60 instead of $2000. Just that alone makes the procedure less painful.
Is this some back alley dentist with a pocket full of leeches in case I need a blood-letting as well? Will they be working with a hand drill and wearing elbow length rubber gloves?
Actually, no. The dentists office is sterile and I’m in a private room with a door (rather than the curtained booth of the dentist in the US). The dentist is very professional, masked from head to toe in a hazmat suit and the instruments of torture are sealed in sterilized pouches until the dentist rips them open, ready to begin her work.
Having your mouth hang open for a couple hours in a place where flying spittle is routine is probably not the best way to avoid Covid-19. The World Health Organization even recently warned against going to the dentist if not absolutely necessary. But for months I’ve had the US dentist’s voice in my head telling me I’ll lose the tooth if I don’t treat it soon. My Albanian dentist tells me it could’ve waited, but too late now.
Maybe this is silly, but I worry more about being an asymptomatic carrier and spreading it to others than I worry about getting sick myself. While 180,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the US , not a single person has died in Cambodia, a country where I’ve spent much of my adult life. Early on, I wondered if this was related to the weather as Cambodia is always hot and humid. Maybe the virus doesn’t do well in that climate? But then the virus began devastating Brazil, a country with a similar climate to that of Cambodia and I had to wonder what makes Cambodia different.
I can only speculate, but I wonder if the people of Southeast Asia have some kind of immunity due to past infections. Covid-19 is in some ways just a reboot of SARS. I remember the fears about this disease that existed in Asia years ago. I also remember getting a terrible fever sometime around 2007 or 2008 with body aches and a rasping lung that lasted for quite a while after I recovered. While healthcare has improved somewhat in Cambodia over the past ten years, I could easily imagine mystery deaths in the years past just being chalked down to pneumonia or old age. Maybe we already went through this in Cambodia and just didn’t realize it.
Back in March, ND, upset about missing baseball and school, howled like one appealing to the heavens: “Why does this virus have to happen now?”
It’s got to happen sometime though and it could be worse.
And I’ve got to return to the dentist’s chair on Monday to finish my root canal.
ADVENTURE-SOMEWHERE.COM 