I’ve really only mentioned it twice, but my tooth had been getting a little worse for several days, and it peaked Monday night with me sitting up in bed at about 3AM almost reduced to tears. I decided that I had to do something about it, and that’s how we spent our Tuesday morning.
It was really pretty easy. We found an emergency dental clinic across from a graveyard on Yonge Street, and I got x-rays and a prescription for Vicodin and antibiotics within minutes. Canadian dentistry works much better than Canadian medical care, apparently, and my guess is that it’s cheaper primarily because most Canadians don’t have dental plans, making the field rather competitive since people have to pay out of pocket.
Everyone I’ve heard from says that the whole “single payer” health plan in Canada leaves a lot to be desired. Ditto for the drug plan, which doesn’t even exist unless you purchase a private plan or get one through your employer. As I found at the pharmacy, the drugs may be cheap, but the pharmacist’s fee for dispensing them can be rather steep. My two presciptions were about four bucks each for the pills and ten bucks each for the “service charge”.
Anyhow, I decided the pain was manageable and that I wasn’t going to let my tooth ruin our trip. Unfortunately, Mark was pretty much feeling like death at this point as well. His stomach was a nightmare, he was feverish, and he had chills. We had lunch at a Harvey’s in a rather bleak shopping center, took a short drive, and went back to the motel. With both of us in a sort of nether region of hell, we pretty much spent the rest of the day in our room, with him sleeping through most of it.
We did escape long enough to keep a dinner engagement with David and Jeremy, though. We must’ve seemed pretty pitiful, but we somehow managed to scarf down lots of Indian buffet before returning to the room to die.