My Trip To The Dentist--Maroua, Cameroon 2013 (A Repost By Request)

It was a late Thursday afternoon in Cameroon's Far North Region capital city of Maroua. I was getting hungry waiting for dinner so I grabbed a handful of peanuts, shoved them into my mouth, and started crunching vigorously. About three seconds into my munching, I chomped down on something a whole lot harder than any peanut I have ever encountered before. It was so hard, in fact, that it broke one of my molars. Turns out that one of those peanuts was not a peanut at all but actually a small brown stone that looked, to a 53 year old guy not wearing his glasses, like a peanut.

Well what do you do in Africa when you have shattered the back end of one of your meat-chomping molars? You go to the dentist of course. So the next day Fidele and I made the mile walk along a dusty makeshift road to whom I was told was the best dentist in our neck of the woods. As a plus, he had also attended dental school……somewhere.

Once there we walked into a small waiting room and waited about half an hour. Then it was show time. Fidele explained to the dentist why I was there as the dentist speaks a blend of Fulfulde and French while I barely get by with English. The dentist motioned for me to get in a chair and then he went to work. Tilting my head back as far as I thought it could go, he motioned for me to open my mouth and then he proceeded to take a small silver hand tool with a point and stuck it into the gaping hole in my broken tooth. Not being tied down or otherwise restrained Fidele must have thought the rapture was occurring and he was being left behind as I must have risen a good three feet out of that chair. Of course the dentist being a non-dispensational Muslim and not having read the “Left Behind” series thought no such thing and after stuffing me back in the chair uttered something that sounded a lot like “Allah have mercy”.

Then, all of a sudden realizing that Americans don’t quite have the same pain threshold as Africans the dentist yelled something in Fulfulde to his assistant who resembled, to me without my glasses, the African version of Osama Bin Laden. Hoping he was instructing him to load up a shot with Novocain before heading back into my mouth I was surprised and really concerned when the assistant took a strategic position next to me so as to better restrain me as the dentist made his next approach. With one arm holding my head in a sort of headlock and the other manipulating the silver tool, he once again stuck it smack dab in the middle of my broken tooth causing me more pain than I have felt since passing a kidney stone 14 months, 28 days, 7 hours and 25 minutes ago (But hey who’s counting?).

Finally, the dentist decided a shot of pain killer might leave less bruising, cause less trauma, and be less exhausting than having to keep me in a headlock. Whew, I was happy for that until I saw him loading up the shot. You see, every dentist I have ever been to in the States used these really tiny short needles when administering Novocain but this baby had to have been two to three inches or more. Anyway, with his assistant getting ready to grab a hold of my legs and the dentist putting me into another headlock he proceeded to threaten me with the hypo making motions for me to open my mouth. Wondering if the reason the needle was so long was because he might just run it through my cheek I submitted and the rest is history. I didn’t feel a thing after that. In fact, that one shot worked so well I couldn’t feel my nose or see out of my left eye for the rest of the day.

So what’s the moral to my story? Well, if you’re thinking it’s to avoid getting your dental work taken care of in Cameroon—it’s not. In fact, it’s been four days since my visit to the dentist and my tooth feels just fine. No, the moral is to watch out for counterfeits—whether they are rocks masquerading as peanuts, false teachers pretending to be preachers, or the fleeting, temporary, and fruitless pleasures of sin. The damage they will cause will be far greater than you ever thought possible and the pain experienced in dealing with and hopefully fixing the damage far greater, deeper, and possibly even more traumatic than you ever imagined.