Dr. Sauza’s Déntica Clinic
Today I got the top right side rear tooth extracted. It was something that kept me awake at night not knowing how to arrange it and trying to figure out what was worth paying for. Should I get the first stage of the implant here and the rest in India? Should I just get my tooth pulled here and do the implant in India? Should a bite the bullet and do the whole thing here and pay more? I thought I knew the approximate costs here and could compare it to what I paid last time in India for an extraction, bone graft, implant and crown for $1050. I’ve never finally priced an implant in the USA but guess that it would cost $5000.
That was the kind of stuff swirling around in my head. But I was in a country where I couldn’t speak Spanish and didn’t know what I was getting into. So this just became another cross cultural experience that I was totally unprepared for and in which I made all the wrong assumptions and finally just muddled my way through. Most cross cultural experiences are like that. You come into them making all the wrong assumptions based on your prior experience and then you let go and stop trying to understand and see what happens.
That is what happened with me when I stepped into Dr. Sauza’s office. I expected no one to speak Spanish and had written out my dental history in English to explain why I had a dentist in Asheville and a dentist in Greater Kailash #2, New Delhi, and was now appearing in her office in Bogata. I pasted this into Google Translate so that I could hand it to Dr. Sauza in Spanish because I was sure that I couldn’t make myself understood otherwise. But by the time I had gotten the receptionist to receive and print my explanation a vivacious young woman translator, speaking perfect English had arrived. She stayed with me for the next hour which was good because when she disappeared and Dr. Sauza talked to me in her Spanish accented English I didn’t understand a word.
I had looked at Dr. Sauza’s website and knew that an extraction would cost about $90. The final bill was $785. I simply didn’t know what I was getting into. The extraction alone actually cost $115, but there were added extras that I knew nothing about.
I know from experience how a dental visit is conducted. A dental hygienist cleans my teeth for 40 minutes, takes an x-ray or two and then Dr. Martin comes in, hears what she has found, asks me to open my mouth, looks around for a minute or two, seems satisfied, tells me what needs to be done, and then is on his way with barely time for a question on my part. He is the boss and I trust him.
But not Dr. Sauza. We sat at a desk together and she looked at the x-rays I had had taken in the other room, then asked me to open my mouth and photographed my teeth from various angles with a digital camera. Then she showed me these photos and X-rays and talked about the coffee stains, my slight overbite, the state of my gums. She wanted to know my family history of illnesses and how long they lived. She wanted to know all about me and took her time doing it, we must have talked for an hour or more.
And finally we came to the tooth I wanted extracted. I mentioned the pain of my last two hour extraction in India. She said I would feel no pain.
Finally when she made clear to me exactly what she was going to do it was time for me to sit in a dental chair. There were soothing beach scenes from the Maldives on a tv screen, the ceiling was painted blue with yellow flowers in the corners. The first thing she did was put lip balm on my lips and then felt around my head to see if there was any pain, almost massaging me and then she passed her rubber gloved hands over my face and bathed me with aromatherapy, a soothing smell. I could have fallen asleep.
I knew that next she would slide a loaded syringe into my mouth and that I would feel the needle as it went higher and deeper, releasing a sedative along the way. But instead there was a quiet clicking sound as some kind of laser injection slid into me without my feeling a thing. In two minutes I was completely numb. I felt nothing then and nothing, no pain, for the rest of the procedure. There was a whir as she cut the tooth in half and then slid out one root after another, all three without my feeling a thing. The whole procedure took about ten minutes. It was a miracle.
Next she scraped the bone to remove any infection, very delicately, and finally she packed bone graft into the cavity left by the extracted tooth and sewed the whole thing up. I could have gone to sleep during the procedure. She kept saying in a soothing voice what a good patient I was. But all I did was lie there feeling nothing and breathing normally. She was the remarkable one, not me.
Then she smiled and explained how I should care for the tooth and I thanked her and I left almost as confused as when I arrived.
When I got to my apartment I used Google Translate to translate my bill from Spanish to English and to see why I had paid $785 instead of the $90 that I thought I was going to pay.
Some of it was for the clicking painless injection, some was for the added cost of scraping my bone of infection. But more than half of it was for the bone graft and something called a membrane which cost together over $500. The bone graft is preparation for the implant, when I get it. I just didn’t know what I was getting into.
But the overwhelming feeling I had was that what I had experienced was the difference between the male dentists I was used to who were the authority figure who did what needed to be done without wasting time explaining things and a female dentist whose first goal was to make me comfortable and to listen to me thoroughly and then to make sure that the whole experience was as pleasant as possible.
I am writing this as the anesthetic is wearing off and the ache of three roots being removed is beginning. But I also realize that I have been through what will probably be the most pleasant dental experience of my life. I really don’t care at this point what it cost, though I am sure the cost is justified.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 