Last night, I was eating when i felt a "crack" in my mouth. I had broke a tooth.
It didn't hurt me at all, and it never did. I take good care of my teeth, but teeth sometimes have a mind of their own.
I called a friend, and another, and they gave me the details on how to go to the Dental Clinic in Sulaimaniya's Piramerd Street.
"You'd enter the center, pay the rate, then go to room #1. There, you'll find a doctor who looks like Jennifer Lopez, only whiter and a bit fat. She would check your tooth and decide what would happen next."
I went in the morning, and there wasn't any Jennifer Lopezes. There was a young dentist and he told me to come back in the afternoon because my tooth needed to be extracted.
I went in the afternoon, only to find the place very crowded, and there was a man sitting at the door of the Examination room organizing the entry process. He told some of the male patients that they must wait for the male dentist to finish a male patient before they would get to enter, for the male dentist was to see the male patients, and the female dentist was to see the female dentists! This sounded as if it wasn't the somewhat progressive Sulaimaniya, but something like Kabul under the Taliban!
Anyway... My name was finally called and i entered the Examination Room which had a completely different / meaningless name in English... Something that was like "The looking-into-your-mouth Dept."! Dr. "Jennifer Lopez" was in the next booth and she had a sort of resemblance to J.Lo's serious roles like the one in Angel Eyes movie plus the glasses. The male dentist was someone like Robin Williams in the movie Nine Months. He, just like the young dentist in the morning knew almost no Arabic, so i had to speak with him in English. His English had a funny accent of sorts, again just like Robin Williams in Nine Months!
He sent me to the Dental X-Ray unit, where i waited for some 20 more minutes before getting to the device, and more English followed with the X-Ray doctor.
Finally, I went back to "Jennifer Lopez" & "Robin Williams'" room, where "Robin Williams" said to me that there was almost no option other than to get rid of the tooth.
I would've, but the problem was that i couldn't let them take the tooth off that day because of a visit to some friends that i was making about two hours later, so i asked "Robin Williams" to try finding a solution for this tooth's problem; and he said that i should check room #22, and see if they could fill it.
I went to room #22 as he said, and there was no Taliban rule that a patient must be examined by a doctor of the same sex. There was a male doctor along with two female doctors. The doctor that examined me looked a little bit like Selma Hayek, although she was whiter and not so Latino unlike Selma.
Dr. "Selma Hayek " had the best English of the day. She said to me the very same thing that "Robin Williams" said earlier, that this tooth has to go. I told her of my time restriction and she said that i will have to go to Room #5 the next time to get the tooth pulled. I thanked "Selma Hayek", and left the building, hoping to come back in the next few days to finish what i couldn't finish today.
God knows which movie star i would run into in this Trip to Hollywood to get rid of my broken tooth!!!
One final note to my father:
Dad! B.D.S. is not Baghdad Dental School! B.D.S. is Bachelor in Dental Surgery!! Otherwise, all of those movie stars would've known Arabic!!!
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