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“I’M afraid that’s not good – it’s going to have to come out.”
As someone on his first health holiday that was when my smile started to fade.
“It’s very close to the nerve – you may feel a little pain.”
That was when my smile packed its bag and headed for the airport. But I needn’t have worried.
Ninety minutes later in the steady hands of oral surgeon Dr Radostin Lezunov I was pain – and rotten tooth – free.
An hour later – with seven stitches in my jaw – I was on a walking tour of Bulgarian capital Sofia.
Another 60 minutes down the line and I was sipping an ice cold glass of Burgas 63 – a fruit brandy popular in eastern Europe.
Granted, a trip to the dentist in Bulgaria may not rank highly on the dream holiday list.
But health tourism is rocketing among Brits with 150,000 people a year taking trips abroad for low cost medical treatment while topping up their tans.
And Bulgaria is fastemerging as a front-runner of sun and surgery destinations.
The former communist state gets more sunshine a year than most of Italy, Croatia and Turkey and boasts a string of top beach resorts along its Black Sea coast.
At the same time its high mountains and cold winters make it a skiing and snowboarding hotspot. It is also home to some of Europe’s finest surgeons in dentistry and orthopaedics.
So when I was left with a wobbly lower molar after a blow in the kisser from a microphone boom stand – don’t ask – I decided to price the relative cost of having an implant in the UK and Bulgaria.
It was a no-brainer. Various dentists in the UK quoted me up to £4,500 to replace my tooth.
They also warned that the treatment could take months and involve extensive bone-grafting. Dr Noori, an implant specialist in Sofia, does them for £660 within a week using hitech basal designs that avoid the need for any grafting.
Extra reassurance came from Hollywood superstar Sylvester Stallone who has publicly declared his love of Bulgarian dentistry.
In 2012 he broke a tooth while filming Expendables 2 there and was so impressed with the work he got that he returned to have all 24 of his gnashers replaced. Armed with Rocky’s endorsement I put myself in the very capa- TOOTH TASK: Dr