At 9:30 on Monday, July 25th, I called the dentist to make the soonest possible appointment. I was offered a choice between a 15:30 appointment or I could come to the walk-in clinic before 14:00. I asked what the difference was and she told me that with the walk-in I might have to wait for an hour and a half. I guess if I’d been in pain I might have chosen the walk-in, but since this was more of an aesthetic emergency, the only pain would have come from the waiting.
I took an early
one-hour siesta before heading out.
I rode up
Lansdowne, which is still receiving repairs, but that was good because there
was no oncoming traffic from the north to intrude on me making a left turn on
Dundas. I took Dundas all the way to Bloor, where my dentist’s office is on the
north west block. It looks like they’ve changed their company name from
Dentistry with Care to Smile City Dental. That’s certainly a better name to
stick with, though I wish they were able to stick with one dentist that I could
get used to. As it is, I pretty much end up with a different delegate of the
United Nations of dentistry every year. The first time I came I had the very
nice Shelly Pang, but then she had immigration problems and had to go back to
Vietnam. Next I had this horrible dentist from India with her clumsy assistant
from Latin America. Then for two years in a row I had the very good Dr Max, who
was from somewhere in Eastern Europe, with a very good assistant who had been a
dentist back home in Venezuela but wasn’t qualified yet to be one in Canada. Dr
Max moved on up to a better practice in Oakville. The next year I had Dr
Thomas, with the same assistant, and I think he was even better than Dr Max. He
was definitely from south Asia and when he gave me his card there was a long
Indian name crossed out with “Dr Thomas” written in. This time around I had a
new dentist named Dr He. It was too bad that Dr He wasn’t a woman, because I
could write a whole Abbott and Costello skit around the name, especially if the
assistant’s name was She. “Who’s your dentist? He is! Who? He! Where is he?
Right there! That’s a she! No, She is his assistant! Who’s the dentist then? He
is!” and so on.
I was fifteen minutes early but his tall
and young assistant called for me before I was settled in the waiting area.
Dr He confirmed
that it was my filling that broke off. He was more concerned though about the
area around the only tooth I have left in the back on the lower right side. He
said that it’s loose and that the paradental pocket beside it has gotten
deeper. He said we needed to take x-rays and so his assistant left the room. I
waited and then Dr He said for me to follow his assistant. It was the first
time I’d had to go to a different room to get x-rays at that clinic. The x-ray
room was sort of white like the other rooms but they don’t seem to care about
maintaining it as much, since it needed a paint job and many of the floor tiles
were cracked and ragged. After a couple of uncomfortable poses I was back in
He’s room.
The x-rays showed
that I had a paradental cyst around the loose tooth and that it could spread if
the tooth was not removed. He also told me that I should get a denture to
replace it because without a tooth beneath them the upper teeth would grow
longer. That didn’t make sense to me because I had some teeth removed when I
was a teenager and I didn’t notice any extra growth from above. He showed me
with a mirror that some of my upper teeth have indeed grown down, but still,
that has been over several decades. At the age of sixty-one, should I be
worried about upper teeth growing down over the next thirty years?
I wouldn’t say that the assistant was
incompetent, but I didn’t get the impression that he had lot of experience.
Quite often when the dentist asked for an instrument either by name or by
number, he didn’t know which one to hand him and so Dr He had to describe it,
often with a touch of impatience in his voice, as in, “No, the round one!” Or,
“No the thinner one!” When the dentist left the room to check whether I had the
insurance to cover the filling, the assistant was still in the room. I asked
his name and he told me it was Bogdon. I inquired if he’d been doing this very
long and he said, “No, not really.” He told me that he was actually a dentist
in the Ukraine but that he needs more training to be qualified to work in
Canada. That seems to be the story with quite a few of the assistants at Smile
City.
Anyway,
He repaired my filling and he said that I needed to make another appointment to
get a cleaning and to have the lower back tooth removed. But there was a
question about my Green Shield coverage, because it only covers a percentage of
the cost. I’d always thought Smile City price was already a discount because it
always balances out to me paying nothing. They had to check with Green Shield
before I could make the appointment, so I waited ten minutes. They found out
that Green Shield has the same coverage for me as in previous years. It seems
that the dentists just choose to take a cut in some cases like mine in order
for me to pay nothing, though it probably means they are still making plenty of
money out of it. They gave me an appointment for Friday.
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