45 Dollars A Tooth"

 "Forty five dollars!; She barked at me and then stared me down.

The receptionist at the University Medical Center's "dental" department, that is; and older black lady with a frown etched into her face.

There was a resoluteness in the way she practically demanded the 45 bucks. It wasn't friendly, it was kind of like 45 bucks, or no dental care.

It made me think of how I had lanced the last abscess that I had about 5 years ago after it had become painful enough and which I could see in my bathroom mirror where the problem was. That time, I had taken an exacto knife and driven it in to the swollen area right above the tooth which was so painful at that point that a stab from such an instrument paled in comparison to the throbbing pain that I was feeling. 

That time, I was surprised by how much blood, but mostly puss, I wound up spitting in my sink. But I was pleasantly surprised when the toothache went away after that.

We need to realize that we are living in an age where so called doctors and medical people in general are practicing something akin to putting leaches on their patients to draw out the bad blood, and heal them.

Damn that bad blood.

The thing that bothered me was being in a situation where I had no choice.

It's like when somebody sues somebody else, and the second person has to drain his life savings to pay some lawyer, just so he can defeat the lawsuit and go back to "normal." Minus his life savings.

I just hate being in such a situation. The tooth extraction was supposedly necessary, according to the emergency room doctors. Or else I would, or might, die. They weren't clear on that except to strongly discourage the use of an exacto knife to perform the same procedure at home.

I paid the money and a female dentist pulled the teeth that had apparently caused the abscess, and she (as it was a female who looked a lot like Kamala Harris) even went so far as to recommend more of my ten teeth that are left be removed. Sure, that would be 45 bucks a pop. 

I could have left there light 135 bucks. It kind of pisses me off how people such as dentists will postulate to me "what's the problem, it's just 135 bucks?"

I hope she has to dig in a dumpster for her food after 4 years of a Biden administration.

I have my exacto knife and hydrogen peroxide and probably more skill that that female dentist who was talking more about Black Friday and whether or not she would have to work that day, and how that would just not be right, given the deals that she would be passing up.

At one point, when she was hacking away, trying to pull the tooth, -I am a pretty good reader of body language et. al. and I could tell that she was over her head and had probably never tried to extract a tooth such as mine. 

She eventually left, after exerting all her strength and causing me pain,  the likes of which had other people in the adjacent rooms yelling and moaning and asking for more numbing.. and enlisted the help of a more experienced dentist saying "I tired" to that particular person -her "tried" being just a mangling of the whole area around the tooth, with the instruments slipping, losing their grip on the tooth, and her causing other areas (that weren't "numbed") to become the casualties of her hacking away, 

All U.S. citizens have the right to some kind of medical treatment. Certainly, any human being laying in the street after having been struck by a car will be whisked to a hospital by an ambulance, regardless of anything else. Even if he is wearing a M.A.G.A. hat.