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captainsblogEmily and I spent a good portion of yesterday among various representatives of the healing professions. Medicine is getting so specialized, you could spend your entire holiday season visiting them all.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, I had to go and see
Twelve D.C.'s adjusting
Eleven Opticians grinding
Ten Therapists shrinking
Nine Oncologists remissioning
Eight Druggists dispensing
Seven Quacks prescribing
Six Vets a-spaying
Five MRI's!
Four out of five dentists
Three specimens
Two homeopaths and
A doc of Optometry!
Only two of those were in play yesterday, though. Part One involved our biennial long round trip to see our dentist (or in this case, his new hygienist). I should probably explain that, since it may seem strange to some that I so easily associate long car trips with the practice of dentistry- whether for us or, as last month, to drive 200 miles and back to take my sister on a five-mile ride to see her dentist.
----
The backstory to this requires familiarity with two facts. My side of the family has notoriously poor teeth as a matter of genetics, and for our upbringing years, this nature was accompanied by some very bad nurturing. The family dentist growing up, when we saw him at all, was barely competent, gruff, and apparently expensive, for we all came to associate the place with something out of a dungeon of doom on Creature Feature. I was into my late 20s before learning that novocaine was routinely administered for fillings. But that cost extra, so we didn't get it.
Avoidance therapy does work well, and so I managed to stay away from the place as well as the entire practice for something close to seven years after no longer needing to provide the East Meadow School District with annual evidence of my satisfactory toothiness. That all ended in my last year of law school, when a sudden abscess shot me into ionospheric levels of pain (on a return visit to Long Island, yet) and returned me one last time to my old nemesis's office. The old coot had retired, handing over the practice to a guy I knew from high school who I didn't particularly like. He drilled away the immediate problem, but I needed to return here for the ultimate root canal, done about ten blocks from this very location by the oral surgeon husband of one of my law school classmates.
That problem was solved, but this wasn't going to be my regular dentist. That awaited the next disaster, barely a year later, crunching into a Gelato waffle cone on Park Avenue in Rochester and having a filling come out with the mint chips. Through that, I met the guy who has made sense of the whole mess for most of the ensuing two decades. He has always been patient, understanding, pain-free and we share as much of a sense of humor as you can when you've got a wad of cotton in your mouth and he has a Lone Ranger mask over his.
Then we moved to Buffalo, and the story, if you can believe it, got stranger. Eleanor eventually wound up with an industrial company offering what were known in the trade as Very Good Dental Benefits. The flip side was a very short list of approved providers, but fortunately, one of them was roughly ten blocks from this house in the other direction. The guy's name sounded like a town in upper Michigan, but seemed decent enough when the first of us wandered in for the first routine problem. After the appointment, though, when he saw what plan we had? You could practically see the $tars in his eyes, and he started laying out grand schemes to fix up all our chompers- including Emily's, some of which hadn't even come in yet- in an ambitious reconstruction plan, all on American Allsafe's dime.
Well, as the historians and southerners know, plans of reconstruction don't go all that well. We knew something was up the first time I went in for a checkup on a prior repair job, and the doctor was not in. That happened at least twice. Now I know dentists have high rates of missed appointments, leading to the constant barrages of postcards and phone calls to confirm them, but usually the resistance to the appointment was on the patient's end. Right around the time of the last missed appointments, Eleanor parted ways with the Very Good Benefit people, and I returned to Rochester-based employment with a dental plan that had our old guy's office on it, so there we were. Dental Vu all over again. That was almost 12 years ago, and while Ron has never laid out a 28-step plan for getting rich on us like this other guy tried to do, we've given him plenty of business over the years, and he, plenty of good service to us. That's worth 70 miles each way any day.
----
The other appointment came up on us unexpectedly but happily: Em's new glasses came in.I'll try to get a picture on the entry soon, but damn they're cute and, more importantly than even that, she can see things in a whole new light now.
ETAHey now.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, I had to go and see
Twelve D.C.'s adjusting
Eleven Opticians grinding
Ten Therapists shrinking
Nine Oncologists remissioning
Eight Druggists dispensing
Seven Quacks prescribing
Six Vets a-spaying
Five MRI's!
Four out of five dentists
Three specimens
Two homeopaths and
A doc of Optometry!
Only two of those were in play yesterday, though. Part One involved our biennial long round trip to see our dentist (or in this case, his new hygienist). I should probably explain that, since it may seem strange to some that I so easily associate long car trips with the practice of dentistry- whether for us or, as last month, to drive 200 miles and back to take my sister on a five-mile ride to see her dentist.
----
The backstory to this requires familiarity with two facts. My side of the family has notoriously poor teeth as a matter of genetics, and for our upbringing years, this nature was accompanied by some very bad nurturing. The family dentist growing up, when we saw him at all, was barely competent, gruff, and apparently expensive, for we all came to associate the place with something out of a dungeon of doom on Creature Feature. I was into my late 20s before learning that novocaine was routinely administered for fillings. But that cost extra, so we didn't get it.
Avoidance therapy does work well, and so I managed to stay away from the place as well as the entire practice for something close to seven years after no longer needing to provide the East Meadow School District with annual evidence of my satisfactory toothiness. That all ended in my last year of law school, when a sudden abscess shot me into ionospheric levels of pain (on a return visit to Long Island, yet) and returned me one last time to my old nemesis's office. The old coot had retired, handing over the practice to a guy I knew from high school who I didn't particularly like. He drilled away the immediate problem, but I needed to return here for the ultimate root canal, done about ten blocks from this very location by the oral surgeon husband of one of my law school classmates.
That problem was solved, but this wasn't going to be my regular dentist. That awaited the next disaster, barely a year later, crunching into a Gelato waffle cone on Park Avenue in Rochester and having a filling come out with the mint chips. Through that, I met the guy who has made sense of the whole mess for most of the ensuing two decades. He has always been patient, understanding, pain-free and we share as much of a sense of humor as you can when you've got a wad of cotton in your mouth and he has a Lone Ranger mask over his.
Then we moved to Buffalo, and the story, if you can believe it, got stranger. Eleanor eventually wound up with an industrial company offering what were known in the trade as Very Good Dental Benefits. The flip side was a very short list of approved providers, but fortunately, one of them was roughly ten blocks from this house in the other direction. The guy's name sounded like a town in upper Michigan, but seemed decent enough when the first of us wandered in for the first routine problem. After the appointment, though, when he saw what plan we had? You could practically see the $tars in his eyes, and he started laying out grand schemes to fix up all our chompers- including Emily's, some of which hadn't even come in yet- in an ambitious reconstruction plan, all on American Allsafe's dime.
Well, as the historians and southerners know, plans of reconstruction don't go all that well. We knew something was up the first time I went in for a checkup on a prior repair job, and the doctor was not in. That happened at least twice. Now I know dentists have high rates of missed appointments, leading to the constant barrages of postcards and phone calls to confirm them, but usually the resistance to the appointment was on the patient's end. Right around the time of the last missed appointments, Eleanor parted ways with the Very Good Benefit people, and I returned to Rochester-based employment with a dental plan that had our old guy's office on it, so there we were. Dental Vu all over again. That was almost 12 years ago, and while Ron has never laid out a 28-step plan for getting rich on us like this other guy tried to do, we've given him plenty of business over the years, and he, plenty of good service to us. That's worth 70 miles each way any day.
----
The other appointment came up on us unexpectedly but happily: Em's new glasses came in.
ETAHey now.
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Date: 2006-12-17 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-17 09:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-17 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-17 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-17 09:14 pm (UTC)Is your dentist aware of your situation? He or she should be. My sister's being treated for congestive heart failure and before that appointment a few weeks ago, she had to down a horse-pill size antibiotic every 4 hours up until an hour before the appointment due to the risk of infection in at least cardiac patients of that brand.
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Date: 2006-12-17 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-17 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-17 10:47 pm (UTC)http://pics.livejournal.com/captainsblog/pic/0004bwt3/s320x320?t=1166395506
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Date: 2006-12-17 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-18 02:01 am (UTC)