Even knowing, as countless studies have shown over the last year, that American health care is essentially the Prada purse of health care (several times more expensive, and at the end of the day it’s the same old sack for carrying around your wallet and keys) nothing strikes fear into the heart of an American as getting health services in a country other than the United States.

So when I had a tooth start acting up in December, I was a little afraid to go to the dentist, but I didn’t have a choice. I called a dentist that I found on the Internet who spoke English, and they were able to get me an appointment for that week, which is way better than my dentist back home could have done. When I arrived, it looked like a normal dentist office, they let me check their certifications and I wasn’t forced to wait for long in the waiting room,

It was when I got upstairs to the office that things started to seem a little strange.  I got in the green, worn chair and the dental assistant put a pillow under my head.  I have never had a dental pillow before and while it seemed polite, it is maybe not the most sanitary thing in the world.  I remembered the office cleaning process from my introduction to dental hygiene class, and there was a lot of alcohol and saran wrap but definitely no pillows.

I decided to trust their methods and not worry so much about the back of my head being on a nonsterile surface.  I expected a cleaning at this point, where the hygienist marks off all of the previous work done on my teeth on the chart.  What I got was a short examination by the doctor himself, the word plomba and numbers featuring prominently in the discussion.  Probably marking my fillings?  He kept asking me if I was OK during this part of the visit; I probably looked a little panicked, which is my natural state when I am in a dentist chair and they are deciding what work needs to be done.

After this, it is x-ray time, and as I followed him to the x-ray room, I noticed that the doctor was wearing house slippers, white house slippers to be sure, but they were by no means shoes. In a country where the women wear heels to buy bread, I really expected a dental professional to at least be wearing shoes. I put that fact in the mental box with the fact that they are using a pillow that can’t possibly be sterile, and continued through the process of getting full x-rays done.

Once I was settled back into the chair with the pillow firmly under my head, I thought, “OK, now there will be the cleaning”.  He surprised me by putting some sort of numbing agent on my gums, but I thought maybe that was just what they do here.  Then he came at me with his giant syringe and I realized that there was going to be no cleaning this day, he was headed straight for the main event.  And he drilled in my head for an hour or so, stuck some tiny sticks in there, drilled some more, put some more tiny sticks in there and it was time for another x-ray.

This was all done pretty much like it would have been back home, with the exception of the fact that instead of using an instrument tray to hold his tools, he just went ahead and set them on my chest. I understand that this is probably more convenient for him than reaching behind him every time he needs another tiny stick, but I really cannot describe how strange it is for me to have a dentist storing his instruments basically on my breasts.

It was the first time I got to take my x-ray home with me.

After all of that, we looked over my x-ray, I supplied him with some key words in English (numbness, temporary, receding bone, bone graft, extra root) and I got to sign off 15 times that I had gotten the treatment plan and that I would pay for my services.  He was surprisingly low-key about it, he didn’t try to talk me into anything; at one point he actually said “I don’t care if you get this done here, somewhere else, back home or wherever, I just want you to know that this is what I think you should do.”

Then he told me that I have to take my x-ray when my treatment is finished, which will make for an interesting souvenir for sure.After this, in the end, I had three more appointments with Dr. Mindaugas, and they were all strange, but he did an excellent job with my tooth. He even wore shoes to the last appointment.

Charissa Brammer is an American student that has been studying at Vilnius University since the fall. Read more of her writing here.

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Views expressed in the opinion section are never those of the Baltic Reports company or the website’s editorial team as a whole, but merely those of the individual writer.