When I arrived in the UAE, I figured I would never go to a dentist here. Bar some emergency. A doctor, sure, for an antibiotic or asthma medication or a checkup. But not a dentist.

We were going to be here 18 months, maybe two years on the outside … but now we are safely past that, and I still had not darkened the door of a local dentist.

It was time. Much as I hated to admit it.

It must be one of the handful of universal human conditions that the idea of visiting the dentists provokes feelings of dread. It will be uncomfortable, even painful, and you will hear things you don’t want to hear — and that’s if things go well.

Plus, how to pick a dentist? Most of your co-workers are in the same boat: A dentist back home, wherever home happens to be, and no real history of dental checkups locally.

One American we work with, who has been here a bit longer than we have, recommended one. So that’s where I went.

The second floor of a clinic/hospital over on the west (wealthier) side of Abu Dhabi Island is devoted entirely to dentists. Must be a half-dozen of them in there, and the waiting room was crowded. Must be a land-office business.

A bit of back story on dentistry and UAE history. Sheikh Zayed, the George Washington of the country, did not have wooden teeth, but he had quite bad teeth, which was not unusual here a few years back. He was born in about 1918, and the small population here, back then, ate a lot of dates, and dates are remarkably gooey and sugary; if Americans ate them they would be No. 1 on the “stay away!” list on dental charts, ahead of Tootsie Rolls and Coke. The story goes, Sheikh Zayed rarely smiled for cameras because he did not want to reveal his decayed teeth. From all those dates he ate, pre-Oil Boom.

Anyway, Emiratis have gotten past ignoring dentists. They seemed to make up a majority of people in the waiting room. Though none of them seemed to be having fun. It was a dental office, remember?

After about 15 minutes, I was invited into the office/examination room of “Doctor Mona”, a woman dentist from Egypt. (Nearly all doctors and dentists in the country are foreigners.) She was pleasant, and her English is good, but I wouldn’t call her friendly.

After a few preliminary questions (“Why are you here? Taking any medications?”), I was in the chair — and all the equipment seemed very modern — and she was poking around. She had a Filipino aide, but Doctor Mona did all dental stuff herself. Including cleaning and polishing.

Neither she nor her aide left the room when they took a couple of X-rays. Were they wearing lead-lined suits? Or is the danger overstated?

Anyway, X-rays showed … things. Which I suspected, but didn’t really want to know.

That “root canal” I thought had been done on the lower molar? No, it was just a crown. Which explains why that area was often sensitive to heat and cold. She showed me a tooth on the other side to see what an actual root canal looked like — a line of “stuff” in the … root canal … leading towards the skull. Like cement stuffed into a hole.

Meanwhile, the crown no longer covered the nerve, because of receding gums. (Yeah. Ick.) Explaining my occasional pain there.

I decided to put that off, because she came up with two issues that seemed less ambitious as well as more pressing:

1. A filling apparently had fallen out of a bicuspid. You’d think I would have noticed … like when I swallowed that chunk of metal. But I had not. Need that replaced. OK, I concede that.

2. Somehow, a crevice had opened beneath another filling, on another bicuspid, and decay had begun beneath it. (Again, ick.) She showed me where, on the X-rays, that was going on. And I could see the dark spot beneath the opaque filling. That seemed like something that needed doing, too.

These decisions were made ahead of the cleaning, which was done with some sort of tool that sounded like a drill but may have been blowing compressed air (I’ve seen that before), or was some high-speed tool. That was not pleasant. I got a bolt of pain from nearly every surface on every tooth. Was it because this is dentistry? Or was it a factor of an old person’s worn-down teeth, being assaulted?

The “polishing,” at least, was as I remembered it, and not painful.

And now I go back in a few days for two fillings — my first in about 40 years, I’d guess.

What dentists didn’t tell us, when we were young, is that a filling is not the answer of a lifetime. In some cases, a big filling will so damage the structural integrity of a tooth that it will lead to the eventual breaking of that tooth. (Me, an unpopped bit of popcorn, 10 years ago.) Or the fillings will fall out. Each has happened to me.

I remarked to Doctor Mona that she “must see every kind of dental work in the world” while working here in Expatria (the UAE). I asked her if she saw any metal teeth of the sort the Soviets liked to use. She said no, she had not. She didn’t seem interested in the line of discussion, so I dropped it.

Dentists must quickly become conditioned to the reality that no one wants to see them (in their offices). Ever. Maybe because their customers associate “pain” with “dentist.” Seems crazy, but …

Many of them seem to be fairly jolly, even. Though Doctor Mona was not.

So, I’m back next week. Apparently, I pay cash, and can get 80 percent of it reimbursed from insurance. I wonder how much two fillings costs here. But it’s not the expense so much as the drill (to take out the one filling) that I’m thinking about.

Maybe I’ll die before the appointment. Then I won’t have to go!