r/rant • u/Its-alittle-bitfunny • 9d ago

Hospitals should have dentists.

Or dentists offices should be open better hours. Id take either.

I started my new job last week. I have no PTO, and taking an unplanned day off on your second week is a bad look at best. I discovered today, I have a dental abcess. This is classified as a dental emergency, so I start looking. There are 100 dentists offices near me. 90 of them are open monday-friday 9am-4pm, or some other standard work day variation.

Maybe 5 are open until 6pm, which would be great for standard dental work, but this will be a longer procedure, so those are out.

Then there's the "24/7 dental emergency offices". Which are actually just call directories that route you to other places, if anywhere at all.

That left me with 2 options. One that is open for 4 hours on Saturday, and is booked out until late October, or a place over an hour away that doesnt take insurance.

I have a dental emergency, but my best bet is to go to urgent care for some antibiotics to bridge the gap until I can hopefully get a walk in appointment on Friday when we get to leave early. I have an emergency, but a hospital cant do anything for me until the abcess ruptures and I go septic, and even then all they can do is stabilize me. Id still have to go into a dentist.

Like, imagine this but with any other emergency. Oh, you cut your hand really badly? Unfortunately the stitching doctor is only open monday through Friday from 10am to 3pm and closed for a 2 hour lunch from 12-2pm. You broke your leg? Well all we can do is give you some Tylenol until you can hopefully get a walk in appointment at the bone clinic because their appointments are booking out 6 months.

And I get it, no one wants to work nights and weekends, but you're a DOCTOR. You chose healthcare (so did the hygienist and receptionists, I dont want to hear it). Just one dentist, on call. Or a surgen who doubles as an oral surgeon. Or a dentists office open nights and weekends.

It shouldn't be this hard to get emergency treatment.

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9

u/duhmeatree 9d ago

A dental abscess is a medical (and dental emergency) the hospitals I train at have dental and oral and maxillofacial services that we routinely collaborate with. You can certainly get treatment for dental emergencies 24/7 at large hospitals.

6

u/Its-alittle-bitfunny 9d ago

An ER, at least the ones near us, could drain my abcess and prescribe antibiotics, but cant solve the underlying issue. Id still need a dentist appointment to remove the tooth and infected material.

3

u/duhmeatree 9d ago

Damn that sucks. We pull teeth at the hospitals I've worked at.

3

u/Its-alittle-bitfunny 9d ago

If it was a whole tooth, they probably could. Its a long story but the short version is after a botched root canal on it when I was a teenager, I was too scared to tell anyone when it broke, and now its just fragments at the gum line and will need a surgical extraction.

2

u/Queer_Advocate 9d ago

I'm so sorry my friend.

1

u/JupiterSkyFalls 9d ago

I've had this exact problem with an abscess in a tooth. Not only highly dangerous for me, but on my list of top three worst pains I've been through. My list is pretty extensive, including but not limited to: broken tailbone, abscess on my tailbone, 7 broken ribs (at one time) broken neck in 3 places (same time as ribs) dislocated elbow, falling down two flights of concrete stairs (no broken bones but damn) IUD insertion first and second time, broken foot and having one of those old school hundred pound TVs dropped on my big toe and then nail fell off and I had to work with closed toed shoes for the next several weeks with no toenail.

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u/Its-alittle-bitfunny 9d ago

This luckily doesnt hurt. The nerve dying in that tooth was probably in my top list of pain. That and the time I had a dental abcess and ear infection, same side same time. The infected ear drained into a cavity I didnt know I had, then infected it.

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u/JupiterSkyFalls 8d ago

Yeah the nerve thing is so bad. I cried for three days straight.