Last Tuesday, the 7th, I worked from home - or actually, from a study room in a local library. I had a Zoom hearing at 11, and during that I noticed that a toothache that had greeted me when I woke up, then subsided, was back. No problem, I finished the hearing and headed out for lunch at KFC. I bit into one fry - a french fry - and you'd have thought I bit into a live electrical line.
Ouch.
I'm pretty familar with tooth pain and thought I could tough it out until I could see my normal dentist.
That . . . was an overestimate of my chutzpah.
By late afternoon I began calling every dentist Google listed in or near our zip code, without luck, and then expanded my search. I finally found an "urgent dental clinic" that was willing to see me, and my insurance, as long as I also kicked in $165. Given the pain, I said yes.
Then, when I got there, they told me that was just to be seen. To have it extracted? That was another $1500 even after my two (not one!) dental insurances. To pay for this, they offered me the chance to sign up for their financing. They were, and are, the dental equivalent of a payday loan place. Morally, not a good look guys.
So it's almost 8pm and I'm just about out of hope. I stopped at Walgreens and bought some oral pain killer to rub on the tooth, but it didn't make a dent in the pain. I went back to Google, and on a whim pulled up dentists in Kenosha, where I work. In retrospect, my first call was the best choice I'd made all day.
That call was to Dr. Robert Salituro at Gentle Family Dentistry.
Keep in mind I was calling him from Milwaukee, That's 45 minutes away from his office, minimum. It was 8pm. He had never met me, didn't know me from Adam, and had every reason to tell me no thanks.
"Does it hurt a lot?" he asked, and I kinda think he was hoping I would say "no" and he could go home.
I told him it did.
"If you can get here in the next hour, I'll help you," he said.
But first, he asked me some medical questions, then told me he wanted to research a side effect of one of my medications before he would proceed. As promised, he looked into it, then called me back and gave me the go ahead to drive down.
I arrived at almost 9pm, but to his credit Dr. Salituro didn't rush the process. He took a more compressive history, took x-rays, and properly numbed the area (I've had a dentist pull a tooth when I wasn't fully numb, telling me "I'll be quick").
Whenever he caused me pain or discomfort, he apologized, and he made a strong effort to keep those apologies to a minimum. He prescribed me antibiotics, and looked for a 24 hr pharmacy near me in Milwaukee that could acccomodate the request.
Me? I tried to focus on the TV in the room, and the horrendous news coming out of LA and the fires tearing up the city there.
Here's what the offending tooth looked like:
This dentist rocked. If you have work you need done, look him up. You won't be sorry!
