I traveled to Hanoi in January for the ASEAN Tourism Form. The evening before flying out, I broke the corner off a molar while eating my mom’s leftover peanut brittle from the Christmas holidays…that left no time to find a dentist. I went to to a grocery store to find anything to protect the hole in my tooth and my tongue from the sharp edges. I couldn’t find anything, so I decided to use a tea candle to melt some wax to put on the tooth. Despite coming out periodically, it worked!
After 20 hours of flights and layovers, I arrived in Hanoi in the late evening and checked into my hotel. I asked if they knew of a dentist I could go to. The night staff didn’t seem to know…perhaps there was dentist nearby. The next morning I was free, so devoted it to finding a dentist. The hotel staff seemed to be a bit more helpful this time and suggested I go to a clinic with foreign doctors and dentists they new of. I got in a taxi and hightailed it over there, only to be told that the earliest they could fit me in for a dental appointment was 3 days later. Not good enough. My tongue was starting to get quite raw from the sharp edges of the tooth.
Back at the hotel, I consulted with the front desk staff again. This time, they looked in the phone book and found another hostpital with dentists who could handle English-speaking foreigners. We called, but the earliest they could make an appointment was Monday morning…I accepted, hoping I could use the candle wax until then. I had brought a couple of extra tea candles so had plenty of wax–despite a tendency to swallow it at every meal.
I still had a couple of hours to kill before my first meetings so decided to explore the neighborhood around my hotel. Just a block away, I found a tiny, 1-chair dental office. I saw a pair of shoes outside the sliding glass entrance door, so took mine off before entering. A young woman inside motioned me to take a seat in the dental chair and then promptly disappeared. As I sat there alone, I looked around at the equipment–perhaps 1950s vintage and a bit grimy and worse for wear–hoping that I wasn’t making a mistake. But within a few minutes she returned with another woman, who was the dentist.
Fortunately, the dentist could speak some English, although not much. She leaned me back in the antique dental chair and shined the light into my mouth. She quickly saw the problem and proceeded to clean out the gaping hole in my tooth. Fortunately, I hadn’t seemed to break it close to any nerves and there was not much pain. Once cleaned, she whipped up a little cement paste and filled in the hole and told me to rinse. The whole procedure took ten minutes. She then took out her cell phone and called someone….managing to tell me her friend could speak better English and would explain things to me. I got on the cell phone and her friend informed me that this was just a temporary fix to my tooth and that I would need to have a permanent repair done when I returned to my home country.
That was it. No more than 20 minutes total including wait time. But now it was time to pay the bill. The dentist told me something…I thought she said 30,000 Dong, the Vietnamese currency. When I took that out of my wallet to give to her, she shook her head no. She wanted 50,000 Dong! Being a bit flustered and not being able to calculate the exchange rate well on short noticed, I decided to just give it to her, thanking her profusely. As I walked out the door and down the street back to my hotel, I figured out what it had just cost me in US dollars–at 17,000 Dong to the dollar, I had just paid her a paltry $3.
I’m back home in Seattle now, but still haven’t seen a dentist–mainly because I don’t have dental insurance. The temporary fix is doing well still. I’m also planning my next trip to Asia…India and Nepal in April. A little dental adventure in Rajasthan could be just what the doctor ordered. I hope the temporary fix lasts until then!
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