Not long before the Christmas Holiday, I noticed that I’d got a decayed tooth. Although it was only a brief scratch, it was just on my right front tooth. I didn’t know how long it had been there and how often I exposed that to others while I was squeezing my slightly awkward smile, mostly due to nervousness. It was indeed quite embarrassing. Therefore, even though I’d never registered with a dentist in the UK, and dentist appointments in the UK are notorious for their long wait, I still decided to give it a go. The first two dental clinics I tried did not accept new registration of NHS patients at the moment, but very luckily, the third one I tried did access me, and they had a time slot on the 28th of December, which was roughly a week after.
Here came the day I had my first dentist appointment. I didn’t wait too long in the waiting area before I was called by my name. Almost everything in the dental clinic is white, from the reception, and waiting areas to the consulting room, apart from a few posters promoting info about dental health hanging on the wall. Even the clock inside the consulting room is white, margin into the white wall, with longer black simple straight black lines as hands and shorter as numbers. The male dentist, estimated young, was friendly, asking me about purpose today without any additional casual conversations, showing no response to my wee jokes, possibly out of nervousness. I couldn’t even tell if he was smiling because he got his mask on. But I could still feel his friendliness, probably. After knowing my need, he started to do some basic examinations. Messing around inside my mouth with his tools, the dentist named the teeth with fill-in one by one to the assistant in an extremely flat and efficient tone. The long name list due to my terrible teeth embarrassed me and triggered me to make funny faces with my eyebrows. The dentist remained unmoved with his plain tone while kept naming my teeth. Lying on the examination chair, the dentist song from the film Little Shop of Horrors started to play inside my head (see below, a classic that one should not miss!). I even had an instinct, wanting to ask the dentist whether he had heard the song before, but I was also sensible enough that I was not supposed to do that. After the basic examination, due to the NHS system, I had to have another appointment to sort out my delayed front tooth, but luckily, the dentist made it for me the same day an hour later. “See you next time,” he said, but I truly couldn’t tell if he was trying to be humorous or just saying it as a routine.
With my phone and a book, I was well prepared to spend the hour in the waiting area. When I entered the consulting room, saying, “hello again,” still no extra response from him. He started to sort my decayed tooth, and it didn’t take him long. Finally, I had my front tooth fixed, and I could put on my awkward smile again.
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