On root canals and cultural prejudice

On Tuesday I had my most terrifying experience yet in Jordan: having a root canal.

I actually have a lot of faith in Jordanian health care, at least in the top hospitals. My wife's experience having a baby was better in Jordan than it was in the US, and most American women who have delivered here will tell you the same thing. We had the top OBYGN in the country, who has decades of experience. The hospital is modern, clean, and equipped with even better technology than I have seen in the US. I got really aggravated with TriCare, the US military's health insurance company, because they kept insisting that Jordan was not a "center of excellence." They wanted to airevac my wife to Ramstein AB, Germany for two months so she could deliver in a US military hospital. I repeatedly told them that I felt safer entrusting my wife to Jordanian doctors than to the US military.

But when it comes to teeth, I'm a coward. In my wife's case, we knew the OBYGN's reptuation and knew we were in good hands. When my tooth started to flare up, I had no idea what to expect. I was especially terrified because local anesthetic almost never works on me. This same tooth needed a root canal last year, and it took six or seven appointments to accomplish, partly because I had so much trouble getting numb. After one dentist spent 45 minutes trying and failing to anesthetize me, he just sent me home and rescheduled another appointment. During the actual root canal, the anesthetic began to wear off halfway through. It hurt like hell.

So I'll admit: I was afraid of going to a Jordanian dentist. I was especially terrified when the dentist told me the tooth was infected and that I would need to redo the root canal. A horror film fired up in my mind of being belted down to a filthy table, thrashing and screaming while an endodontist who spoke no English jabbed needles into my teeth with no anesthetic.

To make a long story short, my fear and prejudice were unfounded. The Jordanian endodontist did a fantastic job. He got me perfectly numb with the first shot. Not only that, he discovered that my American endodontist had broken off the tip of a tool in my tooth--and left it there without telling me. Because he couldn't get it out, he left part of the root intact beneath the broken tip. Worse, the US military dentist who had done the filling had left a big tuft of cotton inside the tooth. No wonder it got infected. When the endodontist scraped the cotton out of my tooth, he held it up for his nurse to see. He said in Arabic--probably not knowing that I was listening--something like, "Can you believe this? This is from America. It doesn't matter if you're American or Jordanian, it's the individual dentist who matters."

True, true. We should take each person on his or her own individual merits. Still, I can't help but feel even more entrenched in another of my prejudices: my fear of US military medicine.