A TRIP TO THE DENTIST

If you’re anything like I am, once you get a dentist you like, you never want to switch. And sometimes finding one you can live with is a little like trying to find a spouse.

In this second case, as an aside, I should (better!) note that my first choice “took”—met her when I was eighteen, married her when we were both twenty-one, and have been with her for the past forty-nine years (much to her credit, since I’ve never been an easy person to live with and because we’ve had to weather some very difficult times). But from what I’ve witnessed in observing others, this is an exception to the rule.

At best, generally speaking, dating, engagement and marriage—or the more modern version of marriage, which has to do with dating, tentatively living together, seeing if it works and continuing on until it doesn’t then going separate ways (sometimes amicably, other times definitely not)—tends to resemble a fishing expedition. Whereas, at worst, it can be a dangerous big game safari, in which it’s hard to tell who’s the hunter and who the hunted, and in which the one who thinks he or she has bagged a real prize can end up getting eaten for lunch.

Choosing a dentist usually isn’t quite that bad, but it can still be similar to taking a devil-may-care walk in a minefield. The first one I had in Buenos Aires was a noted odontologist. He had written several books on dental materials and was a professor at the national university’s School of Dentistry. He was recommended by an American compatriot. I figured the guy’s documented expertise would be a real advantage. Turned out, however, that he wanted to try out every material known to Man in my mouth. What he didn’t tell me however, was that I actually had an excellent set of teeth that I was, little by little, wantonly destroying due to stress. I wouldn’t find that out until years later. So he puts in a nickel crown on a tooth that my perpetually clenched jaws have cracked. Why, because it’s such a hard, durable material that it will be “eternal”. (Yeah, but also so hard that when stressed, it will shatter the tooth under it...which it did within six months). And so I lost my first tooth.

This was also the guy who took out my impacted wisdom teeth. One of them was a real bitch. So, the Material Boy gets out the niftiest little miniature stainless steel hammer and chisel set you’ve ever seen and starts wailing away on my jawbone. After about ten minutes of this, I feel like I’ve gone a couple of rounds with Muhammad Ali and my jaw muscles go slack. “Resist the blows, Mr. Newland,” he tells me encouragingly as he hammers away, “or I’ll break your jaw.”

After that, I happened on another prospect. He was recommended by the guy my sister-in-law was dating at the time—a fellow who was, it should be said, a notorious skinflint. But his pride and joy was a lovely sailboat that he had, which I think was probably what my wife’s sister found most attractive about him. His dentist belonged to the same sailing club and was, he’d have me know, the best in the city. And “best of all” he was cheap.

So the next time I have a tooth complaint, I go to this new dentist with a hearty recommendation from my sister-in-law’s beau. I find his office a little down-at-heel but, I think, “an honest professional, somebody who charges a fair price and so can’t afford better digs.” We talk about our mutual friend, about the sailing club, about what a great person my sister-in-law is, and finally, we get down to business. He’s giving my ivories the once-over, tapping on this, pulling on that with his hook. As he takes it out of my mouth, the hook slips from his hand and falls on the floor. He snatches it up again quickly—as if invoking “the five-second rule”—and is about to slip it back into my mouth.

Before he can, I catch him by the wrist and say, “Hang on a sec. Don’t you think you’d better sterilize that?” He laughs as if I were being a big sissy and says, “Don’t worry, the floor’s immaculate. But hey, if it bothers you, I’ll go get one out of the sterilizer.”

As soon as he heads for the little back room, I’m out of the chair, stripping the dentist’s bib from around my neck, and headed for the door. He pokes his head out and says, “Hey friend, where are you going?”

“Be right back,” I say. “I just remembered I left the beans on the fire.”

Third time was the charm. I met an outstanding dentist—also through my sister-in-law since he worked in her neighborhood—who was knowledgeable, resourceful and empathic. The whole time he was working on you he was reminding you to let him know if you had the slightest pain. There was, he said, no reason to have to withstand pain in the dentist’s chair and if I was in pain, it made his work all the harder. He discovered that I had “very high resistance” to anesthetics—the bartender at my favorite haunt had been telling me this for years—so he started using one that he imported from Germany “for people like me.”

I was kind of male-vainly proud of this fact, the high-resistance thing I mean, until he told me that such resistance was a sure sign of an inability to deal with stress, which meant that I operated at a high level of tension all the time. How was my blood pressure? Fine, thanks for asking. (I’d never had it taken). I had a high-stress job. I was a news editor in charge of an editorial department at a paper that was opposing the dictatorship that was running the country. You couldn’t get more high-stress than that. But hey, I told him, my friend Mr. Whisky and I were handling it just fine.

“Not according to your teeth,” he says. “This one has a fissure, these two are chipped, these are showing signs of gum retraction...”

“So you’re telling me I have bad teeth?”

“No, I’m telling you that you have an excellent set of teeth that you’re destroying as a result of bruxism.”

“Brux...what?”

“Bruxism, when you clench your jaws all day and grind your teeth at night. I’m going to make you a bit to help you keep from wrecking the rest of your teeth in your sleep.”

The Doc and I had a long and fruitful relationship. In fact, when I moved out of the city and went to settle a thousand miles away in Patagonia, I would wait to go to the dentist until I could fly back to Buenos Aires. Then came the day that I called his office and got no answer. There was no message machine. Nothing, no response, though I called a dozen times to try and make an appointment. On a trip back to Buenos Aires, I went by his house, where he also had his office. The block of wood on which his brass shingle had been mounted was still there, but the plaque itself was gone.

I called up my sister-in-law and asked if she knew anything about the dentist.

“Oh, him?” she says, “he moved!”

“Where? I need an appointment.”

“Italy.”

“Italy!”

“Yeah, he got dual citizenship because his dad was Italian and decided to take up a friend on an offer to open a dentist’s office together over there.”

“Well, that’s just great! Now, what am I supposed to do?”

“Uh, stop whining and find another dentist?”

So the search began again.

In the ski resort that was the nearest town to my new home, I knew practically no one. By coincidence, however, one of the few people I did know happened to be a dentist. I was reluctant, however, to go to him, since my first encounter with him hadn’t been as a dental professional, but as a local wheeler-dealer.

He showed up at an adventure tourism conference that I was attending and made a special point of meeting me. He had set up a private horseback trek for the next day in the mountains near the small, remote, Andean town where the event was being held and invited my wife and me along. We had a great time, if a very long journey—ten hours on horseback in the mountains is a long time when you haven’t been on a horse in twenty years and were never much of a rider to begin with—but I had a gut feeling that this wasn’t a disinterested invitation.

And I was right. Not long after I moved to Patagonia, he contacted me to talk to me about a business venture. He was planning on gaining control over a swath of land “on the other side of the lake” and wanted me to come in on the deal. I said, “Why me! I mean, I know a lot of people think us Yankees are born with a gold ingot under our arm, but believe me, I used the last of my savings to buy my place, and I’m just a regular working stiff.”

Not to worry, he told me. Anybody could make money with money. The trick was to do business with “other people’s money.” I should leave that to him. “All he wanted me to do” was be the general manager, you know, the visible face of the development venture. If I came off as honest to other people as I did to him, I’d be worth my weight in gold.

Frankly, I needed the work. I was trying to adapt to having moved from the big city to one of the remotest parts of the country and wasn’t at all sure how I was going to make a living in a place where my twenty years as a newsman would be about as useful to me as ice cubes in an igloo. But, nothing about this sounded kosher. So I did what I was good at—investigation. What I found out was hair-raising. This dentist, with his flashy clothes and flashy cars was better known for his scams than for his practice. The venture he was talking about was, I discovered, a move to take over land that belonged to local Indians and the often poor families of pioneer settlers, who had old deeds that tended to be “iffy” under modern regulations. And much of their land owed back taxes, through which a slick lawyer—which the dentist had as a partner—could find a way to pay the state and gain temporary possession of the real estate. I didn’t understand the details and didn’t want to, since the few other people I knew and talked to about him said I might want to steer clear of Doctor X.

Taking their advice, I started avoiding the guy. Finally, he one day drove out to my place and wanted to know if I was giving him the cold shoulder. Honesty’s the best policy, so I told him the truth. That I’d looked into the venture and wanted no part of it or him. He acted hurt, said he was sorry I felt that way. That he’d offered the deal to me first because of the great respect he had for me...yada yada yada.

But then, I suddenly had a dental emergency and had no idea where to go, so I called him up. I needed a root canal and a cap and he was the only dentist I knew. So I called him.

He was friendly and accommodating. Gave me an appointment right away. His place was impressive. I complimented him on his consulting room.

“Ha!” he said. “This is nothing. Let me attend you in my VIP salon.”

“Your what?”

“Follow me, friend.”

He led me into an adjacent consulting room that looked more like a stateroom on a private yacht—dark-stained teakwood paneling, indirect “mood” lighting, a small built-in bookcase with leather-bound volumes, tongue-and-groove eucalyptus flooring, an overstuffed soft-leather-upholstered armchair, a Tiffany-style belle fleur floor lamp, and, at the center of it all, his dental chair, covered with the same deep-green-stained soft-leather upholstery as the armchair but surrounded by equipment that looked like it had been designed by NASA. Off to the side, I noticed a sideboard with several bottles of single-malt scotch and fine Irish whisky.

“So, you entertain in here as well?” I asked, nodding toward the whisky.

“Oh that,” he laughed. “No, whenever one of my high-end clients is in the chair, I offer them a whiskacho. Doesn’t bother me if they drink while I work. Would you like one?”

“No thanks.”

“Don’t be shy, I know you like whisky.”

“Thanks, I’d just like to get on with it.”

He sat me down in the incredibly comfortable chair, turned on an examination light that seemed to have come from a lighthouse, and started going over my teeth with a fine-toothed comb. Talking around his mirror, I said, “Itha gnolar ung uh ’ower ‘igh aha gack.”

Fluent in dentist-speak, he said, “I know, I know. I’ll get to it. But since I’m in here anyway I’ll have a look at the others too.”

Then he got out a card with a perfect set of teeth, uppers and lowers, diagrammed on it and a fine-tipped marker and as he continued his examination, he went, “Hmm...aha...tsk-tsk...wow...uh-oh...” and so on. And as he did, he marked this, shaded that, circle this and exed out the other on his diagram. When he was done, he took his mirror out of my mouth, shut off the examination light and said, “Frankly, Dan, I don’t know how in the world you’ve gotten this fat with that mouth. How the hell do you eat?”

“Obviously, no problem, except for the molar on the right at the back that I came in here about,” I said, starting to get irritated.

“Okay, well, let’s see...” He got a calculator out of the pocket of his tailor-made uniform jacket and punched keys for a few seconds. “I figure you’ve got about ten thousand dollars worth of work to do there, but don’t worry I’ll extend a credit line to you which you can sign today and you can pay as you go with one easy monthly installment.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Wait a sec. I just came in for a dental emergency. All I want to take care of is the tooth I came in for.”

“Well, I don’t recommend that. I mean, teeth are like car parts. You have to fix them all, because if you fix one and not the other one, it starts affecting other parts and all of the sudden the whole thing breaks down.”

“Well,” I said. “Thanks for your concern, but for today, let’s just take care of the one I came for.”

His mood darkening, he said, “Okay, if that’s the way you want it...Follow me.”

He led me, with the bib still around my neck, back to the plebe section and sat me in the normal chair before calling in another dentist—a pretty, young woman professional who seemed serious and efficient.

“This is Lola,” he said. “She’ll do a root canal on that tooth. Then we can talk about the rest.” Lola did a wonderful job, put in a temporary filling and sent me to the receptionist, who broke the price to me so quickly that my knees went weak. The dentist dropped by the reception desk and said, “When you come back to get fitted for the crown, we’ll set up that credit line.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Yes, of course.”

“Would you like to set up an appointment?” the receptionist asked.

“I’ll check my schedule and call you,” I said. I had no intention of calling, or of ever coming back.

So I went around babying that temporary filling for a time while I tried to find a dentist who drove a Ford or a Renault instead of a Mercedes-Benz. At about the same time that this was going on, I started doing well enough in my new environment that I figured it was about time we got some real health insurance. Once we did, I went to the local office and asked for the name of a good dentist. The young woman who waited on me handed me a list of all of the dentists in the area who had health care contracts with them.

I said, “Uh, great, but what I’d really like is a recommendation.”

She glanced around to see if anybody was eavesdropping, then confidentially, she said, “We aren’t supposed to do that.”

“Okay,” I said, “let me ask you another way. Who is your dentist?”

Without hesitation, she said, “Dr. R.”

“And do you like him?”

“Like him? I love him! There’s not another dentist like him in the world! He almost makes you want to go to the dentist.”

“Okay. Give me his number.”

And that’s how I met Dr. R., or Marcelo, as I call him by now. I’ve been his patient for the past twenty years. And I’m pleased to say that he’s enough younger than I am that, with any luck, he’ll be my dentist forever! He is a firm believer in non-pain dentistry and he always remembers why patients are called “patients” and tries not to abuse that patience any more than necessary. I’ve never had to wait for him to attend me more than ten or fifteen minutes, and only when an unexpected emergency has cropped up. He respects his appointment schedule almost to the minute.

Marcelo is prone toward detailed descriptions of maladies and solutions affecting his patients. His explanations are consistent, timely and educational, crash courses in dental hygiene and mechanics. He has been an auditor for pre-paid medical insurance firms to help them decide who the best professionals are to have on their rosters—which is why he was discreetly appalled that I had been to Dr. X, letting me know he was glad my better judgment had led me to limit my contact with the guy to one visit.

My dentist is a minimalist. He will never recommend radical, expensive treatments when something simpler will do. And he always provides his patients with a series of options when they are available. His own rates are reasonable, he works with all major medical insurance firms, and he partners with dental mechanics who are just as honest and reasonable as he is.

Over the course of our twenty-year relationship, he has never once given me cause to doubt or distrust any treatment he has provided to me or to ever feel that he was “just in it for the money”. For instance, if you’ve always wanted a gold incisor or ornamental edging on your front teeth, you’ll have to find another dentist. He’ll refuse to tolerate your vain fantasies. Nor will he cap your teeth because you’ve always wanted a perfect smile. If you get a cap from Marcelo, it will be because you needed it, and it will look exactly like your original tooth.

Absolute, no-bullshit trust is what he inspires, which brings me to why his take on the COVID-19 pandemic is so telling. Last week, I knocked loose a cap. I sent him a text asking for an appointment. He texted back that, due to the pandemic, he was just now reopening his practice after a fifty-day hiatus. It was, he said, “really complicated” but if I was game, he’d see me on Tuesday morning at ten.

Now, I should point out that, ever since I moved to Patagonia, I’ve become more and more hermit-like, but at least I would go out once or twice a week with my wife to go to the bank and then to breakfast, or to do the Saturday shopping and have lunch out. But since the start of the lockdown in Argentina in mid-March, I hadn’t been past our front gate. So my naturally hermit-like tendencies had become borderline agoraphobic. Going to town to go to the dentist after sixty days in absolute isolation seemed, then, like a very big deal.

I left early, masked like a bandit from neck to eyes, in case of traffic jams of the kind I was used to near town at that time of the morning. I needn’t have worried. Strict federal quarantine measures are still in effect all over Argentina. Citizens can go out for very limited reasons (to buy groceries, to go to the doctor, to go to the pharmacy, to go to essential-service jobs) in accordance with the numbers of their national ID cards: odd numbers one day, evens the other, Sundays stay-at-home. Except for a Provincial Police quarantine checkpoint where things slowed to a crawl, the rest of the fifteen miles to town was smooth sailing in very sparse traffic.

I was able to park right in front of the building where my dentist has his office, something unthinkable on any normal weekday, when I would have had to leave my truck four blocks away at a parking garage. I looked at my watch. I was forty minutes early. Any other time, I would have walked a block up the street to a bar I knew and had a cup of coffee, but all bars and restaurants remain closed because of the quarantine.

So I sat in my truck and reflected for a while. All the way into town I’d been thinking about how carefully I had followed the safe and sane social distancing and prophylactic measures put in place by Argentina’s federal government, how I’d defended them against the comments of American acquaintances who considered them “exaggerated”, overly cautious, martial law-like, etc. How I had defended them as well against Argentines with conspiracy theories about their being part of a plot to impose authoritarian rule. In fact, I had gone them one better and lived in complete lockdown.

But I also reflected that it seemed natural for fear to wear off, for people to get used to existential dangers and to take bigger and bigger risks as soon as things started getting inconvenient. I couldn’t help recalling the AIDS epidemic when, despite the proven fact that condoms saved lives and protected against a modern-day plague, huge international campaigns had to be mounted to convince people to use them, to convince men to put them on and women to insist that they did and to convince people having same sex intercourse to implement these precautions as well. Now it was masks and despite the overwhelming evidence that they helped save lives, people were still rebelling against putting a piece of cloth over their mouth and nose, as if their basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were being violated because the health authorities were striving to keep them out of harm’s way. It was like with seatbelts when they were first made obligatory: “By god, I won’t have the damn government telling me what to do. If I want to fly through the windshield at seventy miles an hour and split my skull open on a tree trunk, that’s my constitutional right!”  

Still, I wondered if I wasn’t incurring in an overabundance of caution. I was almost terrified to leave home, and even more scared to be going to the dentist. How did I know what precautions he was taking not to infect himself and me with this deadly virus? Maybe, however, I was just being a paranoid lunatic.

Again, however, I needn’t have worried. Marcelo was being paranoid (abundantly cautious) enough for the both of us. At the door of his building, I was stopped by a burly security guard in a black mask who asked me where I was going.

“To the dentist,” I said.

“Hands...” I held them out and he doused them liberally with a spray bottle full of alcohol. “Turn toward me, sir. Raise the visor of your cap.” He then pointed a little pistol-like thermometer at my forehead and waited for it to beep. “Okay, you’re good to go. It’s on the mezzanine.”

At Marcelo’s office, I knocked on the door. I heard him say, “Just a minute please,” and then heard him scurrying and rustling around inside. Finally, he opened the door. He was already masked and gloved and wearing his operating uniform. The waiting room looked different, stripped of everything extraneous—curtains, floor coverings, the TV that usually hung from the wall tuned to a news channel. There was a vinyl sheet hanging between the waiting room and the door to his consulting room.

“Okay, stop right there,” he said as I stepped inside. “Take off your coat and cap and hang them there. All right. Now come over and sit on that chair, take off your shoes and place them on the paper mat next to the chair. Fine. Now I’m going to ask you a series of questions. Do you now have or have you had a fever in the past fifteen days? To the best of your knowledge, have you been near or cohabitated with anyone who has had fever or symptoms of COVID-19 in that time? Do you know anyone who has had the virus, and if so, how have you interacted with them?” And so on for over a dozen queries.

When we were done there, he said, “Okay, now come with me.”

We stepped to the other side of the vinyl curtain where he motioned me to sit on a second chair. From a small table he picked up a disposable paper poncho and slipped it over my head, covering me to my waist. Then he picked up a hoody made of similar material and placed it on my head, with the bottom skirt of it covering my shoulders and chest. Then he knelt in front of me and slipped a pair of paper boots on me that covered my legs halfway up to my knees.

He led me into his consulting room. Which had also been stripped of every ornament and doodad. It was his chair, his dental equipment and his bare desk. Nothing else. He covered the chair with a large paper sheet, then invited me to sit down and lie back. Once he had accommodated me, he said, “Now it’s my turn.” And for the next five minutes or so I could hear him busying himself with preparations in the next room, including a thorough scrubbing of his hands before he snapped on a fresh pair of gloves.

Marcelo came back looking as if he were hazmat-uniformed for a day’s work in the core of a nuclear reactor. Fifteen minutes and my cap was back on my tooth good as new. Now we did the process in reverse—back to the chair outside the consulting room door where he stripped me of all the paraphernalia he had put on me. Then to the waiting room where I put my shoes, jacket, mask and cap back on, and finally, standing near the door, I signed the card that he would turn in to the insurance company. I was about to turn and leave when he said, “Wait, give me your hands.” He liberally squirted alcohol gel on them and told me to wipe them down. Then he used his gloved hand to open the door for me and we bade each other good-bye. I realized that as soon as his next patient arrived, Marcelo would have to go through this entire tedious process again...and again...and again...

Once back in my truck and on my way back home, I realized that nothing that I was doing to keep my wife and me safe from the virus was an exaggeration. I knew Marcelo to be a minimalist and a non-alarmist, and if he was taking all of these precautions, they were necessary. And for a moment, I felt sorry for all of those who didn’t believe that they were.

My dentist, I knew, had my back.