!Ay!

Let's time travel back to October 5. It's the second night of the Blue Coyote production of Departures and I'm out at South's bar with the gang afterwards, congratulating them on another show well done. The food there is always surprisingly tasty, so when Gary offers me a sip of his hot soup, I say sure. I have two immediate responses: a) Mmmmm, tasty, and b) Ouch! What is that searing, stabbing pain shooting through one of my teeth?

Well, the pain went away about as quickly as it arrived, but since then I've been having off and on problems with that tooth. It's been sensitive to hot and cold, making eating helado a mixed blessing—not that I've let a little hurt stop me from even one delicious mouthful of pain-inflicting goodness. The tooth eventually got bad enough that I actually hassled Silvana, my friend who's a dentist in Haedo, to look at it a few weeks ago. She did, x-ray and all, and found no particular cause for alarm--no hidden infection, just a sensitive tooth. Just another indignity of aging. She gave me lots of free samples of sensitive tooth toothpaste.

Jump forward last night, when my lingering tooth pain apparently decides it has been a back-seat presence long enough. ¡Ay! is Spanish for ouch, as in: ¡Ay! It's midnight and my damned tooth hurts! or ¡Ay¡ It's 3:30 and I still can't sleep with this pound-pound-pounding! or !Ay¡ Good morning, torcaza, you stupid — ¡Ay! — bird!

So I called Silvana and she wonderfully said to come see her a lunchtime today. I hopped on the train to Haedo (it's about 3o minutes to the West).



You'll notice that there's no charming old rusted sign at the Haedo train station. That's because a couple of years ago, local juvies burned the station down in a small riot over poorly managed trains. This is one of the reasons Silvana and Adrian don't, in general, like the idea of me taking the train to Haedo. But it's quite safe and unriotlike during off-peak hours. You do need to choose your train car a bit carefully, though. Some of them don't have any seats at all. At rush hour, these get completely jammed from wall to wall and beyond with people like cattle on their way to...never mind. Just get on a car with seats.



So Silvana picks me up at the station and drives me the few blocks to the lovely consultorio she shares with her father.



Her mom is also a dentist, as are her brother and sister-in-law. I think there's another dentist in the family, too, but I forget who it is. I'm a bit apprehensive about my first Argentine root canal, but it goes quite down OK. Well, I could have lived without the first part, where they had to cut off the old crown to get at the bad stuff underneath, but after that, it was smooth going. Silvana's definitely the sweetest dentist I've ever had, cosntantly apologizing for every small twinge or pressure.

Here are my dentists. ¡Muchísmas gracias, Silvana y Enrique!



Anyway, you learn all sorts of interesting things having an emergency dental procedure in a foreign country. Like: you can just walk into a pharmacy here and ask for antibiotics without a prescription. And the Spanish words for root canal, throbbing pain, rotten tooth pulp, and don't be such a baby.