A Dental Dilema

Hi everyone. I just thought I'd let you know what our latest adventure is. When we were leaving Cambodia 5 weeks ago I bit down while eating and something happened to a back molar. Yikes did it ever hurt! I developed a permanent toothe ache and eventually an ache along both my upper and lower jaw. Now you have to understand, in Cambodia anyone can hang out a dentist sign and in Vietnam it was nearly as bad but also Tet which is their New Years. Tet lasts over two weeks and is impossible to get anything done. I took anti b's ( you can buy them over the counter just incase it was infected and hoped like hell it could wait till Bangkok.
I looked up a good dental hospital in Bangkok and the day after we got here, a Sunday, I was getting accessed. by that afternoon I was on my way to a filing, no need for root canal. It was bloody scary though because I had the tail end of a cold when you have all that awful stuff in your throat, I felt like I was choking the entire time!
Now here's the good part. This hospital is state of the art and you go from accessment to appropriate expert bang, bang, bang. I even saw a video of my procedure which looked like one of those cheesy real life medical shows where everything was jiggly because of where the camera was mounted. Right now I'm sitting in a waiting area with free wifi and a cumputer to use as well as a huge central pool type fountain, large screen tv, a three story window and a chic cafe.
Sorry I got off track. While I was here the first time Philip decided to have a cleaning and check up. Well it's now in the middle of three root canals and four crowns later! We're stuck in Bangkok getting all this done.....and it won't be completely finished till we get back here after Nepal on our way home!
Now you might think how could this happen and are we being taken for a ride? No is the answer. We can see all the evidence on various diagnostic equipment, xrays etc and we have come to trust these people really quickly. In fact we've never seen such a professional facility anywhere. The problem is our dentist knows we have no insurance, so while trying to keep our teeth healthy he has stayed away from big work he probably knew was coming. Also he has been semi retired for a few years and our care has gone from consistant to patchy.
The good news is that the cost is likely to end up being well under half of what it would cost at home...having said that, damn it!

On a side note the other evening we found ourselves in a state of the art imax movie theatre watching Johnnie Dep do his thing in 3d inAlice in Wonderland, on the first day of it's release here and for that matter maybe anywhere! Not as good as we thought it would be but definitely entertaining.