I arrived in Europe with a sore tooth and World Cup fever. I left with a half-completed root canal and the unpleasant memory of shitting myself in a Barcelona club.
The holiday had been planned for months: my family’s “boys tour” through Russia for the 2018 World Cup, followed by a wedding in the sunny south of France.
I had given myself a month after wisdom teeth removal before travel, expecting that I would have made a full recovery.
What I hadn’t counted on was the development of a dry socket – a horrendously painful condition when the clot that develops after a tooth removal is dislodged, exposing underlying bone and nerves.
I was told it would be fine in a few days – a hilarious lie. Unable to drink booze, I spent the first night in Moscow hazy on codeine, miserably sipping borscht and watching crowds burst into nationalistic cheers.
On my second day, I visited a dentist – the first of six. My then-boyfriend and I spent a sunny morning wandering the streets, helplessly refreshing Google Maps and entering random offices until we found our destination in a near-deserted shopping centre.
I gave them $70. They packed my mouth with a medicated gel and gave me a script for drugs.
We flew to Kazan, an old city on the banks of the Volga, to watch Australia lose to France. I vomited on the plane, sick from antibiotics and strange painkillers.
Our apartment looked like a crime scene but there was a kind dentist a few doors down who I visited a couple of times, showing them a useful screenshot I had saved on my phone which translated from English to Russian.
“Hello,” it read, “I have a dry socket after wisdom teeth removal. Can you please help me?”
The third dentist was in nearby Samara, during the second week of the World Cup. A woman in heels ushered me up four flights of stairs, gazed into my mouth, told me I had “very bad gum” and gave me a script for painkillers banned in almost every country on Earth.
Australia drew with Denmark.
We flew to Nice, France. I was ecstatic to leave Russia, where my brother had downed shots of vodka and sung The Horses on pub tables with boozed-up locals while I spent hours Googling “painful dry socket forever”, more acutely sober than I had ever felt in my life.
The dentist in France was a lovely guy with a charming accent, who didn’t charge and told me it was OK to have a “glass or two” while on antibiotics, which I translated to “get absolutely blind at the wedding”.
My then-boyfriend spilled red wine on my white dress, we toasted the bride and drove to Barcelona. I was, frustratingly, still in pain, which led to dentist number five.
Dentist #5 wore a confronting red uniform and had a teenage receptionist on crutches. They told me I didn’t have a dry socket, but needed a root canal.
An hour later, I had a sheet pinned to my mouth and a dentist chipping gleefully away at my gums while chatting about football, as if I had capacity to reply beyond a vague moan.
After weeks of antibiotics, I was more constipated than I’d ever been in my life. But finally being off medication meant I could drink, so I took a laxative and celebrated with a few glasses of champagne.
By midnight, I was standing in a club off La Rambla, unaware I had quite literally shat my pants, dancing like nobody was watching.
But no longer constipated.
We flew to Berlin. Dentist #6. They completed my root canal and cleaned my gums for good measure. It cost several hundred euros, but she gave me her card so I could “visit her next time I’m in Berlin”.
My trip’s ending was on-brand. Our flight was delayed, which meant we missed our connection home from Munich. I arrived back in Australia just in time to make the dentist on Monday morning.
