The day my teeth fell out in Bosnia

6 October 2024

At six on a Tuesday morning in Sarajevo, my upper left bridge of five crowns fell out and landed in the bathroom sink.

I’d become aware a few weeks earlier, while on a bus from Sofia, in Bulgaria, to northern Greece, that things weren’t as they should be with one of the crowns. It seemed to shift when I prodded it with my tongue.

“Something’s going on,” I emailed my usual dentist in Hungary, where I already had an appointment for early the next month for follow-up root canal therapy.

“It can’t just be one crown involved,” she replied. “You have a bridge. They’re all connected on that side.”

Oh, shit.

During the week I spent in Thessaloniki, I walked as if on eggshells, brushed my teeth with the gentlest of motions and ate a lot of soup.

Then, a few days after I’d arrived in Bosnia’s capital for my fourth Sarajevo Film Festival, the whole plate simply fell from my gums one morning, as if it had been held in place by just a lick of spit.

Oh, fuck.

I was enrolled for a film masterclass that morning with rom-com darling Meg Ryan, as part of the Sarajevo Film Festival. It wasn’t a hard choice to make: “When Gummy Met Sally” wasn’t ever going to be a good look.

My priority was to find a dentist who could see me as soon as possible and re-afffix the plate temporarily.

“Dental emergency!!!! Help!!!!” I emailed calmly to the front desk downstairs at my regular hotel in Sarajevo.

Mirela confirmed at 09:10 that she’d wrangled me an appointment at a dental practice right across the street. Luckily, I had some face masks with me. I’d just spent a couple of months in Transylvania, and the similarity between Count Dracula’s bloody pegs and my own remnant posts might have scared any small children I encountered while crossing the road.

Three dentists worked on my mouth for an hour so that the original bridge could be shoved back up onto my gum and held insecurely in place by copious amounts of glue. It would see me through the next two weeks of watching European films on dark themes in darkened cinemas.

Back in Budapest, I had seven appointments in ten days to replace the posts that had broken off, and to fashion a new long-term temporary bridge until I can return to Budapest early in the new year for a permanent fix.

The sensation of losing a quarter of my teeth in one fell swoop one Tuesday in the Balkans may very well have been the sixth worst experience of my life. I was incredibly fortunate to be staying somewhere I was known and liked, so that people wanted to help me when I felt so vulnerable. I’m grateful that a dentist was available for a quick and affordable temporary fix within a few hours at a location that couldn’t have been more convenient. And while I missed out on meeting “Sally”, I was able to get my teeth back into the film festival and to enjoy another extended stay in wonderful Sarajevo.

For more travel tales, please see “SKINFUL: A Memoir of Addiction” (Golden Grrrl Books edition, 2024) available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the usual platforms.