Genre: horror

Travis likes to tell stories about our travels, but occasionally strays into politics. I like to write humor, mostly, but this time I am going to stray into horror. If you have a dental phobia, I advise that you a.) Read no further, and b.) Don't go to the dentist in Belgium.

While we were in Amsterdam I noticed a slight tooth ache. I wrote it off to the occasional tooth aches I get when my sinuses are really stuffy. Apparently that can happen, my last dentist explained to me. But as the week went on, I noticed more discomfort, until on Wednesday and Thursday nights I was waking up in the middle of the night to take ibuprofen. I had not yet found a dentist here, but I knew it was time. Friday I called a hotline that helps expats find English speaking doctors, but they didn't have any dentists listed in Gent. They gave me the web page of the phone book, and I looked up a dentist that is only a block away. The woman I talked to said she was comfortable with English, and, I'll admit, I was sort of glad that the first appointment she had wasn't until Monday. I was beginning to suspect that the tooth hurting was one that I already had a crown on, which probably meant that it would have to be a root canal. Fun. Spent the weekend on tenterhooks, which are apparently "hooked nails for securing cloth on a tenter" or so I hear.

When I went to the office on Monday, I was immediately informed that the dentist I had the appointment with was out sick (his wife), but that the husband had a cancellation at 2:30 PM. Could I come back then? Oh yes! Feeling like a condemned woman who had been granted a small reprieve, I dashed out and ran some errands. Later that afternoon I arrived about 5 minutes late, but the appointment before me wasn't done yet anyway, so I got the opportunity to look at dental flyers in Dutch (interesting!). Colgate is trying to break into the market here, I think.

At about 2:45 the gentleman rushed in, and invited me back to the patient room. I'm used to having to fill out intake paperwork, but I guess they don't do that here. I sat down in the chair, while he hurried around dumping out trays, disinfecting apparatus, and tossing instruments in another room.
"What brings you here?" he asked brusquely. "Just a checkup?"
"No, I have a painful tooth with hot and cold sensitivity." I admitted. He asked me a few questions about how long I had been feeling the pain, and tilted the chair back. A few probes later, I admitted I couldn't tell for sure which tooth it was. My whole lower left jaw was hurting, honestly. He took an xray, offhandedly asking me if I was pregnant right before shooting the film.
At this point he entered my name, phone number and address into his computer.
"This is not such a nice street, the one you live on." He said. I shrugged, and commented that it is close to the train station.
"That is the only good point about it."
Sadly, the xray didn't reveal any more information about the tooth, so he blew some cold air on my teeth. "Can you feel this?" he asked.
"Oh! God! Yes!" I cried. He took the air away.
"Can you still feel it?"
"Yes!" I said, as pulses of agony rippled through my jaw.
Then he took a piece of cotton and got it very cold with, I think, dry ice. "Oh boy." I gasped. This was going to hurt. He put it on one molar...nothing.
He held it to my crown...little tears popped out of the corners of my eyes.
Yup, that was the one.
"I don't think I am going to be able to get the crown off." He warned. And then all of a sudden he pulled out this three inch needle. Whoa, what's going on here? One minute we're trying to figure out what is going on, next minute he is pulling out a huge syringe. What is he doing?? Usually, in the states my dentist would discuss with me a little more what is going on before they just start.

I cringed and said something like, "jesus!" when I saw the needle. As my family knows, I am not good with needles. In fact, sometimes I pass out. The last dentist I had in the US didn't even use that sort of needle anymore, instead some sort of space age thing that would directly numb the gums and tooth she was working on. All of my dentists in the states would at least put a little bit of topical anisthetic on a Qtip and numb the injection site first. My heart started really pounding.
"Would you prefer to do this without this?" he asked dryly, waving the needle in my face.
"No! I'm just one of those people who really doesn't like coming to the dentists!" I said, feeling really panicky now. He made some comment about how no one likes going to the dentist. I rolled my eyes away and tried to at least not see the needle.
Then he pulled out some sort of bizarre torture device and started bashing my crown trying to get it off. Most dentists in the states don't even use those anymore, I read later on the internet, because they can damage the underlying tooth more than it is worth.
"Well, it is well made." he said. "I am going to just have to drill through it."
"Can you DO that?" I asked, my stomach lurching. "Isn't there metal in there?" (Gosh, this thing was expensive, too. Now you're going to drill through it? I thought).
"I can't tell from the xray," he answered. No more information than that, the drill just comes out. He doesn't say anything like, "if this hurts, raise your hand". After a few moments of drilling he says, "There IS metal in there." No, REEEALLY. Switches out the drill bit, gets back to work. Suddenly, more pain is stabbing into my jaw. I raise my hand.
"I can really feel this." I say. He grabs the needle, and almost with relish stabs it back into the hinge of my jaw again. Picking, of course, a new spot to jab, one that wasn't numb, so I got to feel the needle going in again.
I am sensitive to dental anesthetic. It makes my heart race, and it makes me shaky. On top of my pain and fear already, now I feel like my heart is going to lurch out of my chest and go down the hall for a brisk jog.
I draw in a ragged breath and say, "If it still hurts, I will raise my hand again, okay?"
"Tilt your head back more," he instructs. "Can you still feel anything?"
"I can still feel cold, and a feeling like stabbing pins in my tooth." I told him.
"You aren't supposed to feel anything." He sternly admonished me. Now this is my fault!
"But as long as you don't feel pain..." he starts drilling again. Okay, okay, he doesn't define the feeling of being stabbed by pins as pain. Maybe one must be crushed by stampeding buffalos for it to count as pain in this country!
Suddenly, it feels more like he is jamming a power drill directly into my tooth, sans anestethic completely. My hand flies up, more tears form in the corners of my eyes. He throws down the drill in frustration.
"It must be infected, that can keep the anesthetic from working." He packs some antibiotic into the tooth, and throws some sort of seal over the whole thing, tells me that the pain will go away in two or three days. Makes an appointment for me on the 22nd, and says, "I don't have time to do a root canal today anyway."
Well why was he fishing around in my tooth with a drill then? This will remain a mystery.

I have trouble understanding what he says when he says how much money I have to give him, and I notice my hands are shaking like a leaf as I hand him the cash.


Cut to later in the evening. I make soup, Travis gets home, we eat, and I joke about my whole left side of my face still being numb. I take two ibuprofen before the numbness wears off, because hey, it hurt before it got bashed for five minues and then drilled open, right? Gradually the feeling returns to my cheek and tongue.
7:20pm: I started to feel a distinct throbbing . I know you can take more ibuprofen then the dose mentions on the bottle, so I take two more.
8:00pm: The anesthetic is pretty much worn off. I can't sit down, can't even stay still. I walk around the apartment sobbing from the pain. We spent the next twenty or thirty minutes on the internet trying to figure out if it would be safe for me to take any more ibuprofen.
8:30pm: I tell Travis to call the emergency dentist number in Belgium, for evening and weekend emergencies. I can't take it anymore. Two or three more days like this? No. Just, no.
8:40pm: No one answers the emergency number. Travis starts calling other emergency medical numbers, tells the story to each person, and gets transferred to someone else each time. I pace, sobbing. The pain is radiating into my neck, my whole mouth, it's like the sun and my whole body is just sort of orbiting around it.
8:43pm: Travis finally gets transferred to the on-call dentist, and she calls in a prescription to a local hospital. He runs out to take the bus there to pick it up for me. I contemplate hurting myself somehow just to get my body to release some more endorphins, and to maybe distract me from my tooth hurting.

The happy ending is Travis, my hero, getting back with some amoxycillin and paracetamol with codeine. I'm also NOT going back to that dentist, we decided. Does anyone know a nice English speaking dentist in Gent who will give me some diazepam? I don't think I'm going into a dentist's office in the near future without it.

Sneeuw!

It is snowing! Most of you have seen snow before, and some of you have a lot more experience with it than you want, but this has been a week of fascinating weather firsts for me. On Tuesday it pseudo-snowed for two hours. I was told it wasn’t really snow, only kinda-snow. It was snowish icy stuff falling from the sky though, which I’d still never seen, and fell in big chunks that melted moments after hitting the ground. After an hour some metal eaves and the tall grass started to build up wet slush, but that was the extent of it, though for half an hour it did come down pretty fast. I was surprised by how heavy these little snow-ice-chunks falling from the sky were. They made a clicking sound when they struck my jacket. And I think they had it out for my eyebrows and eyelashes.

On Wednesday morning everything was covered with thick ice and frost. The slush from Tuesday had re-frozen over everything creating a very white, slippery world. The fog was still thick, and the naked trees were white and icy, creating the eerie gray and white frostscape I’d only ever seen in pictures. It was much more exiting to see it in person. That morning I learned about sleet on my bike ride to work through some brutally cold wind. It was microscopic frozen rain, very quietly hissing against my jacket as I challenged the ground ice at top speed. The elevated ruffles on my outer jacket layers collected the particles, and by the time I got to work I looked like a cobalt tiger with jagged white stripes. And white eyebrows.

This morning I left a numbingly cold Gent, and stepped off of the train in Harelbeke into about a centimeter of snow (apparently even Flanders has microclimates). It had been falling there for a little while, and was continuing to pick up. This snow was smaller than the Tuesday ice drop, and was coming down in interesting, swooping ways following little contours in the wind. I picked up a fluffy pile of snow and tossed it into the street (by then already a chocolate slushy). It still “clicked” off of my jacket and got in my eyebrows and eyelashes.

It was coming down even faster as I tore through Zwevegem on my bike, and I learned that while riding very fast, snow in the face stings, and wow does it jab you in the eye constantly. By then the squares and lawns in Zwevegem were thoroughly covered. The Markt looked like a huge flat sheet of quilt batting, and all of the grass expanses looked like they’d been replaced by polystyrene. It was interesting to see how the powdery phenomenon behaved- sticking into the bark on the windward side of trees, gathering on the tops of juniper branches in little tufts, collecting on eves and windshields. I crunched through the biggest piles I could find when I got to work (which weren’t terribly deep, since I guess this is pretty mild snowfall). Still, this is the first time I’ve ever seen it snow all the same, and quite exciting. Still, even the so-called "fluffy" snow isn't so fluffy- I'm surprised by how hard and heavy it is.

As soon as I got to work a coworker took a few pictures of it. The snow won’t leave my eyebrows alone even in pictures! It's supposed to stop snowing and rain later on, but then snow more and stronger tomorrow.

Most fun..and for none of the reasons you are thinking

Hello all, this is a picture of the Central Station in Antwerp, another beautiful train station here in Belgium. I took this picture on the way back from Amsterdam this weekend.

We went up to visit our friend, who we know online as "Allieboo", on his way through the Netherlands on a business trip to India. I took the train up to Schiphol station to meet his flight on Friday, while my other half had to stay at work for a long meeting. As Boo is currently on crutches, he didn't get to see too much of Amsterdam, but I managed to get him a cup of coffee in a genuine Amsterdam cafe using my small stock of Dutch. It made me look like quite the expert, although if we had done anything more complicated the illusion would have collapsed!

On Saturday, after dropping off Boo at Schiphol again, Travis and I went into town to visit the Anne Frank house. It was lucky we got there pretty early. When we went in, the line was about twenty people long. When we left, the line stretched all the way down the block and around the corner! The library I worked at in San Diego hosted a traveling model of two of the rooms from the Anne Frank house, so I was curious to see how the traveling exhibit matched up to the real thing. It was...different. The actual Anne Frank house was not restored to resemble how it did during the war, furniture-wise. But we did see the actual pencil marks they made on the wall where Anne and Margo had been measured while they were in hiding. There was a guest book to sign on the way out, and we left our names, the date of our visit, and a short note. I confess, as I signed, I got pretty choked up.

After a cup of hot chocolate to fortify us, we went on to see Rembrandt's house. Like most houses in old Amsterdam, the actual building was narrow. There were four floors, each leading up to the next through a very steep, dark staircase. When we finally got to his studio on the top floor, it was amazing how airy and full of light the room was. We also got to see a big collection of his etchings, which were absolutely gorgeous.

This one was my favorite. At only 5.1 x 4.6 cm, it was also very tiny. But Rembrandt can really work an area that small!

For lunch we went to an Indonesian restaurant and had Gado Gado, a coconut vegetable dish, and Nasi Goreng. We also had fun trolling through some of the neat shops in Amsterdam, including a great used book store. Out of all of the cities we've visited, Amsterdam is probably the best loved. It's got such an interesting combination of historic and modern things all together. Yes, there are sex shops and marijuana cafes, but anyone who goes there just for that misses out on some really awesome stuff!

Our Civilization has Advanced far Beyond what 100% of your Brain can Comprehend

I have really wanted to stay away from non-personal, non-travel, or non-European related topics in this blog, but some recent events in Boston have prompted me to comment on the high profile activity in that city at this time, since I am quite familiar with the issue as well as the subject material involved. Do I take it seriously? Yes. Do I think it is funny? Yes. Most importantly, there is a lesson to be learned here.

As many of you by now know, an ad campaign launched by Adult Swim (a late night adult themed block of Cartoon Network), involved hiring the third party viral marketing firm Interference Inc. to launch an ad campaign. The firm, in turn, hired two young urban performance and video artists to create installations, which they were to publicly display in ten cities across the United States in promoting the surreal cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force and its upcoming movie. The installations were, in effect, four batteries on a blackened poster board powering some LEDs. They were LiteBrites. The images were none other than Iknignokt and Err, “the Mooninites”, a popular pair of returning characters, flipping the bird at passersby.

On Wednesday afternoon, a call regarding a “suspicious package” was made to the police in Boston. When I went to bed here in Belgium, I was aware that some “suspicious packages” had been found in Boston, and it snarled traffic and transportation as bridges and such were shut down. I knew right then, when a dozen of these things had been found, that there was more to the story. I was shocked to learn in the morning that the whole hubbub was about glowing posters, and had nothing to do with bombs or packages, or anything resembling bombs or packages. (Though those that look silly will disagree). I was doubly shocked- and doubled over laughing, when I read an early article on the topic stating that they were ads for a cult cartoon. They explained the show poorly and didn’t name it at first, but as soon as they started referencing delinquent moon men, I knew exactly what they were talking about.

By then, the “oh, shit” game had already started. Now I won’t ever criticize law enforcement authorities for responding to and investigating a threat, but they should have been much more surreptitious about it. Had they investigated it immediately and quietly, they should have been able to determine that a poster board of a cartoon character flipping you off isn’t a bomb. As far as I know, terrorists also do not generally advertise the location of their weapons with glowing lights. Had they kept it on the low down (i.e. dome some cursory investigation and fact checking before panicking), then the media would never have known to report “suspicious packages” that were not packages. Only when the local news service started propagating rumors and quite frankly, false information, did all of the other “mysterious packages” begin popping up. I place a lot of the blame on those entities for providing feedback to the situation. (Note, this kind of thing happens all the time in airports, subways, and rural streets where kids just want to play live action Mario Brothers, with five teenaged girls being threatened with a law suit in the latter case. It fizzled.)

So it snowballed into a huge, snarling fiasco, and every official and their grandparents became involved, sweeping pronouncements were made- all over some glowing posters. So naturally, when Turner finally realized what was going on, and informed the authorities, it was chalked up as a bad misunderstanding and ill-advised ad campaign, right? Hello no. Apparently when you make the Boston police look stupid, somebody has to pay the piper, and the two artists who hung the poster boards up are being tried as felons- Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens. And here is where it gets interesting. This is now a PR spinfest, and its spinning rapidly and aggressively down into my skin. The tactic of Massachusetts is to now hit hard and fast, focus the blame intensely on these two young artists, and control the language and debate used to discuss the issue.

Assistant MA Attorney General John Grossman said “if they had been explosive, they could have damaged transportation infrastructure in the city”. Um. If your glasses had been explosive, it could have caused damage to the infrastructure of your face. The level of desperation and absurdity in this statement is self apparent- what kind of Attorney General makes an argument that doesn’t exist? A desperate one. “Sure your honor, our officer tackled an old man they thought had a gun. I mean, it did turn out to be a cell phone, but we’re going to try him anyway because if it had been a gun, he could have hurt someone.” Grossman insists on calling the LiteBrite poster boards “bomb-like devices”. Oh noes!!1!! Every pixel board, neon sign, matinee, and well- anything with glowing lights or wires is now a “bomb-like device”. Stay clear of Las Vegas, that place is a mine field! It was comforting to hear that the first time he showed the posters during the arraignment hearings yesterday and said “these bomb-like devices”, snickers rippled across the entire courtroom, and not just from people sympathetic to the defendants. He’s clearly trying to frame the terms of the case, but he isn’t fooling anyone, including the judge apparently (more on this later).

Among the other fun elements of the PR damage control spin machine: Said Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, "this is a product of “corporate greed”"? Really? Check your facts you ignorant tool, the show is the product of a handful of art school graduates that were given a budget of a couple thousand dollars by Williams Street to work on what was supposed to be a short-lived, badly animated, and absurd series of shorts. As a goof-off project. It just happened to attract a cult following and more episodes were made, and even now the artists cater directly to the fans and it was never intended to be main stream. They said as much to us in their panel at the 2005 Comic-Con. It isn’t Paramount, New Line, or some big network TV show or Showtime. It’s absurd sub-culture. You can’t slap down the “corporate greed” card on a show that generates comparatively little revenue and caters to animation geeks. Until yesterday, most people in the USA didn’t even know what the hell Aqua Teen Hunger Force was!

It’s also funny who calls them what- pay attention to who calls them “ads” and “posters” and “light boards”, and who calls them “devices” and “implements”. And who calls this a “stunt” and who calls it an “ad-campaign”. I don’t need to explain it to you.

My greatest irritation is the use of the word “hoax” to describe the advertising campaign, a term all other news sources have stopped using except for Faux News. A hoax implies intent to deceive. These were glowing posters of a cartoon character… advertising the cartoon. Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds”? That’s approaching a hoax. The Proctor and Gamble belongs to the Church of Satan thing? That was a hoax. These were simply ads, representing exactly what they were, and that Fox is still calling it a “hoax” after even the Judge presiding over yesterday’s hearing stated “it appears the suspects had no such intent” to deceive is ridiculous. Of course, Faux is already telling us how we should feel as they describe the “SHOCKING” video of the artists perpetrating the “HOAX”. Shocking? A video of a couple of guys hanging up LiteBrites is shocking? Faux news can go to hell.

And those young men are lucky they posted that video. Both the artists and the firm they were working with documented the plan and process very well, and it is clear that it was intended to be an ad campaign, with absolutely no intent to cause a panic. That video and the communications between the artists and Interference Inc. are going to help them a lot, because it shows Faux and the MA officials are full of crap. The hilarious part of all of this is in the fact that these posters were hanging up for three weeks before someone called the police- in ten cities. Hundreds of these things were hanging in Portland, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago… and in the entire three weeks not a single other city freaked out and caused a bomb scare. New York and Philadelphia only started taking them down after they learned of the panic in Boston. Indeed, in laid back Portland the police intend to leave them up, even after the circus in Boston. Portland Police Sgt. Brian Schmautz said to CNN “At this point we wouldn't even begin an investigation, because there's no reason to believe a crime has occurred.” (Lena and Lisa, did you happen to see any of them? They are selling for hundreds of dollars on e-bay now). I guess Portland wins the Free Speech award of the day.

So Boston is angry because they freaked out at a Mooninite flipping them off. Now as someone on the Adult Swim forums pointed out: “They claim that removing the (first) device “took three hours and cost thousands of dollars. If it took the bomb squad three hours and thousands of dollars to defuse a LiteBrite, Bostonians have a lot more to worry about than glowing ads”. So now I am going to buy my hilarious shirt to support the two scapegoat artists: here (It took all of two hours for that shirt to appear on e-bay)

I look forward to when this case is thrown out and/or, the men are acquitted. Because when this is said and done, there is no way that the felony charge is going to hold water. Everything the officials in Boston are doing is sound and fury, and the worst they can do is fine the artists for hanging up objects on municipal property if such an ordinance exists. They are already on record as being 100% cooperative. End of story. I’m sorry that the Boston Crew reading this had to suffer as an example of America being afraid of it’s shadow, but there is an important lesson to be learned here.

Do you see this Faux news? I hope you do because I'm doing it as hard as I can.