This past summer, I was being a good twenty-something and flossing my teeth with one of those tiny flosser-thingies with the handle on them when the floss caught itself in a little gap between one of my molars and the well-worn filling that lived there. I tried wiggling the floss out all nice and gentle, but it wasn't budging, so I did the sensible thing and started vigorously yanking the little floss stick up towards the roof of my mouth. In a matter of seconds, the floss had been successfully dislodged and was so generous as to take the filling and the back half of my tooth with it. Like any self-respecting young man with a decent pain tolerance and no dental insurance, I proceeded to act as if nothing had happened. Cut to roughly a month later, and I'm a sleepless, nervous wreck who is popping ibuprofen like a proper junky and pouring clove oil into the place where my tooth used to be to cut the pain.
Eventually, I decided to bite the bullet and go in to get the tooth taken care of. I didn't have a regular dentist, so I decided to head to this place on the outskirts of town that was open on Sundays and advertised crowns for $599. The dentist's office—ingeniously located next door to a sweets shop—was remarkably modern, with all sorts of automated x-rays and rotating do-dads to examine your teeth and was staffed by a very pleasant group of dental assistants and receptionists and the like. After filling out all of the requisite paperwork about my medical history and (lack of) insurance, I was brought back into a little kiosk with a dentist's chair, an assortment of menacing dental equipment and a flatscreen TV that had been equipped with Netflix and was playing an episode of That 70s Show. This was undoubtedly the second coolest dentist's office I'd ever been in, falling behind the pediatric dentist I saw in my youth who had stand up arcade game versions of Donkey Kong and Popeye to play in the waiting room.
A few minutes later, the dentist came by to introduce himself to me and to go over the rather limited options I had if I wanted to save my tooth. The dentist, a 1st generation immigrant from Turkey in his early fifties, was exceedingly nice and also seemingly desperate to convey his familiarity with American culture to his younger patients, if him addressing me as “my bro” and “my brother from another mother” are any indication. However, despite this unorthodox and borderline inappropriate bedside manner, the man came off as genuine so I didn't think much of it. Going over my paperwork, the dentist nodded and muttered to himself, not seeing anything he deemed out of the ordinary until he got to the section where I had listed what medications I was taking, at which point he wrinkled his brow and a wave of confusion came over his face.
“Fluoxetine...buproprion...lithium...” he said, tapping the paper with his pen in time with his recitation of the medications. “Why are you on these?”
I was taken aback. A non-psychiatric medical professional had never asked me why I took the drugs I took before, especially not a dentist. What the hell did it matter to him why I took them?
“Ummm...I've been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, panic attacks and generalized anxiety disorder.” I told him.
“How long have you been taking these?” the dentist asked me.
“Wow...uh, the Lithium I've been taking since I was 17, so, a decade now. And the other two I started back in 2009.”
“A decade?" he said. “Shouldn't you be better by now?”
Shouldn't I be better by now? Had this guy lost his damn mind? At first I wanted to jump out of my chair and go on a 3 minute-long tirade about this man's complete and utter lack of professionalism and his troglodytic understanding of mental illness, but something stopped me. This guy wasn't being purposefully insensitive...he was just ignorant. After all, it's not like he got much of a primer on mental health when he was in dental school. Better to just let it go.
“I am better now,” I told the dentist. “But if I want to stay better, I have to keep taking the medicine.”
“So, you're not going to come in and shoot the place up or anything?” he said, with the impish grin of a 9-year old who said a very funny, naughty thing.
“No,” I told him. “I think you'll be alright.”
Read More