The Mexican Dentist and Blue Ribbon Day
About 64 years ago, I had my last Blue Ribbon Day. Blue Ribbon Day was an event for grade schoolers at John G. Carlisle in Covington, Kentucky. On this day at the end of every school year, a Blue Ribbon inscribed with gold ink was bestowed upon you if you had gone through the gauntlet for the standard of grade school good health in the 1950s. This meant you had all your childhood vaccinations and exams and were declared to be qualified to inherit the Blue Ribbon health icon. Though a piece of blue satin stamped with gold coloring seems trivial, it was something elementary school students wanted. Those who did not get one were disappointed.
Now all this could go south on you unless you had ineluctably leaped the highest Blue Ribbon hurdle of all by prayerfully slinking tremulously into a dentist’s office and let him jab around and hook your teeth and gums with picks as he determined to find something to de-enamelize with his high pitch router that jarred your head and cavities when he leaned down on it after jabbing a 6 inch needle into your gums and jaw bone.
My dentist could have been the top enforcer for the Gambinos when they wanted somebody to spill the beans. If amateurs used a Die Hard battery hooked up to somebody's nipples, tongue, and family jewels when he was standing in a bucket of water while wearing copper shoes and that did not yield results, then all the Gambinos would have had to do was call in "The Closer", my dentist. He didn't need a trunk full of ancient, rusted implements from the Inquisition. All he had to bring with him was a tool that looked like it came off of Captain Hook's right hand. He used to poke around in every nook and cranny with that thing looking for exteme sensitivity. When he found a cavity, he would probe around in there a while, and then - as he withdrew it - he would pluck the edge of the tooth with a twang. You could hear that thing vibrate and hum like a tuning fork when he did that. At the same time, the room would light up like the Trinity nuclear test site at the White Sands National Monument in 1945. If anyone had any information to offer, he would sing like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
A few years ago I was slapped awake one night by Linda from a nightmare. When I awoke, I was on top of her with my hands around her neck. She told me that before she could wake me up, I screamed, "Where's that hook, you #&^%*$! I'l ram it . . . (etc)" I was seeing my old dentist's face, but I was trying to strangle Linda.
I have a Trinity of terrors. If I were to put them on an intensity meter, my fear of dark ocean waters would be about the level of my belt. Vipers would be at my hairline, and a dentist with a hook would be at the top of a redwood. I rued the hour The Blue Ribbon Day had ever been invented.
In his chambers I would seize the arms of the dental chair in a death grip like John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles when he buried his fingers into the dash board of his car. My back and stomach arched up off the chair like a rainbow as if a forest fire was under my pants and nearly touched the light the dentist was using to see where to inflict gawd-awful pain. When Linda was a little girl, she remembers being taken to a tooth-torturer who either had Parkinson’s Disease or the Palsy. His hands were clenched with tremors. He could only stop his left hand from trembling by wrapping her skull in a head lock while his router hand shook like Barney Fife drawing his gun in Mayberry.
In the cowboy movies, gunslingers in the 1800s sometimes had to stare down a dentist. They could call Wyatt Earp out into the street without breaking a sweat, but when came time to stagger over to the dentist’s office, the saloon and stiff drink was the first stop. They numbed their heads into wooden blocks with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a gallon of Osage Rub. Their nervous systems collapsed into convulsions when they retired into the dental chair as if they were sitting naked in a freezer on a block of ice. The pain of tearing rotten teeth from inflamed gums and pushing a drill into a raw nerve to fill a cavity without sedative was the equivalent of a Biblical crucifixion.
So for all of us who crossed the finish line on Blue Ribbon Day, it was like we had been taken down from a cross. We had been through an excruciating hell and now had a year’s reprieve before the tribunals began again.
Our experience in the 2008 housing crisis in Florida made the affordability of seeing a dentist impossible at the time. So a number of years passed without dental intervention.
But in 2014 when we were Activity Directors in Tucson at an RV resort, we became aware of thousands of seniors pouring over the Mexican border to submit to world-class tormentors who could compete with the world’s most elite dental fiends. They have a phrase for this. It’s called “dental tourism.” People travel all over the world to other countries for first-class dentistry at bargain prices for dentists trained in the U.S. and at the top medical schools and universities in their own countries. They use the latest technology, and their prices are a FRACTION of those in the United States. Many Americans, South Americans, Europeans, and Canadians flee to Mexico. A Los Algodones web site says you will save 40-70% on most procedures over prices back home.
So the years went by. In December of 2019, I made this statement to Linda. “When we go to Arizona in February, let’s go to a dentist down in Mexico.” Although Linda had heard the same thing about Mexican dentists as I had, that comment to her sounded as if I was saying, “There’s a dental sadist in Mexico without any credentials or experience, but he is performing excruciating dental experiments at bargain basement prices. What do you say we go see him?”
To my daughter this sounded like I was making an appointment with a prison dentist on Rikers Island or at a community dental clinic where interns practiced for free on guinea pigs who had more guts than money.
You can cross the border at many points for these appointments. But we chose Yuma because a friend of mine had been going to an exceptional dentist in Mexico for 13 years just across the California border in Los Algodones, Baja, California, Mexico. Los Algodones is a popular border town destination of 5400 people for medical tourism. Why so? It offers more pharmacies, doctors, dentists, and opticians in a concentrated area THAN ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. Now that last sentence alone should get your attention. They have about 6 or 7 physicians, about 20 optometrists, and 500 dental offices with 2,000 dentists. This place is obsessed with inflicting all the designs and technology of dental excruciation upon thousands of people who need it. That is why it is informally known as Molar City.
With reluctance, I called them on the phone to make an appointment. I wasn’t sure when I was coming, but the receptionist told me,“When you get to Yuma, call me back.” I had never heard that before because making an appointment with a dentist in the US was like waiting for the answer to a revenue question from Turbo Tax. In the US, once you had the appointment, you could be suspended in torment for weeks waiting for it because you couldn't stop thinking about it day and night.
When I got to Yuma, I called again, and she said, “Do you want to come today?”
In Mexico, you can go to the dentist the day you call or You Can Even Waltz In without an appointment, and they will see you. I chose the next day because I had been mentally harassed about it for years, and I wanted peace. Knowing I had to go to a dentist eventually was like hearing the beating heart beneath the floor boards in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Proceeding across the Mexican border as soon as possible was kin to the conscience-clearing confession of murder and ripping the body out of hiding.
Yuma is right on the Colorado River, which is the Arizona/California border. As you enter into California, for the next 7 miles advertising billboards about dentists assault your fears once more before you exit I-8 and go south about 2 miles where you either enter Mexico with your car or drive into this huge Disney World parking lot on the US side for a fee of $6.00. Hundreds of senior citizens from their 50s to their 90s are plodding through the gate into Los Algodones.
When you cross the border, the place turns into a Midway. Relentless, loquacious circus barkers are in your face out on the street in front of medical offices and souvenir shops vying for your attention and probably a commission too. But the dentists totally dominate the scene. I never could get an exact number, but I asked several people how many freaking dentists were in this joint, and I heard numbers anywhere from 500-1500. As you gaze around at all the commotion and people yelling in this Mexican bazaar, you ears are inundated with a cacophony of mixed retail jargon being shouted out all around you, like “root canals, belts, implants, holsters, cleanings, whips, dentures, hats, fillings, serapes, bridges, bifocals, and necklaces.” The whole place is an intense sales market designed for financial extraction.
So you must come with a recommendation, or you will have no idea where to go or who to trust. You are surrounded by confusion. I had done my research and had that recommendation. I was confident our choice was sound. In fact, we had heard that dentists came from Los Angeles to see the man we were going to see, Dr. J.
His office was a perfectly safe 4 block walk from the gate. Lots of people and shops lined the way. They will pick you up in a car at the gate if you wish, even from Yuma or El Centro if you fly in and don't rent a car. The reception area would have passed for many American dental offices, as the picture attached to this article shows.
After we went in, introduced ourselves, and sat down, some guy in a black medical smock and a pair of blue jeans came out, introduced himself, and shook hands. He was an engaging, disarming soul. It was Dr. J himself, the dental surgeon. I had never had a white-coated dental commandant from the Schutzstaffel emerge from behind the sound-proof doors in the back where pain and misery were both muffled and dispensed and greet me before. And in blue jeans, no less.
Linda was jerked to attention in just minutes and called to give an account of herself first. After about15-25 minutes, she got some X-rays and an explanation of what she needed along with a price sheet of the recommended procedures. Price: just over $800. That included a cleaning, a root canal, and a new crown. Then they dragged her into the back again and started in. She was done in 2 hours. Three days later she was back to complete the crown. Now she could relax.
Mexican dentists get down to business. You won’t dwell on nightmare visions of an additional level of Dante’s hell prepared just for you. You aren’t dangled for weeks in an envelope of terror while you conjure up the worst nightmares dentistry has to offer. They show you the X-rays, explain them, give you the total, and immediately proceed to the finish line. They are efficient. You don’t come back 50 times and stretch it out. You don’t have time to change your underwear or put on layers of deodorant or visit a prayer room or go to Mass or repent of grievous sins that you suspect are the reasons you are here. None of that. You are in and you are out.
Then came my turn. Same thing. They took X-rays, explained them, and handed me a list of procedures needed with a cost analysis. It looked bad, but I swallowed hard and made the executive decision by firmly stating, “Let’s do it.” In less than an hour, the first pound of the hammer came down: a root canal and a filling. THAT DAY. The needle, Novocain, and drill was virtually painless. I felt nothing. Instead of becoming an iron bar with neck, arms, torso and legs hard and taut as if I had been frozen solid on ice, I could sense the curvature of the chair breath me.
However, my ordeal was just beginning. Little did I know that we were starting out with the easy stuff. The screws of anxiety were just beginning to turn. All this was done on a Wednesday. I was due back on Saturday for what I thought was the main event, which brought me straight up out of the bed a few times at 3 am. That’s because they PREPARED me for 3 days with some pre-medication for an EBGI: EXTRACTION, BONE GRAFT, and IMPLANT. I had seen commercials of implants on TV with some guy using a ratchet to screw what looked like a lag bolt into somebody’s head and gums while I swallowed hard and said, “Oh, crap, I hope I never have to have that.”
When I first saw the words “2 extractions, 2 bone grafts, and 2 implants” on the list of recommended procedures, all I could picture was that patient in Little Shop of Horrors with his finger nails buried into the over head plaster while he hung from the ceiling like Spider Man trembling in terror above a dental chair. He had been sitting alone in the chair with his thoughts, pounding heart, and sweaty hands looking at all the Medieval torture tools laid out on the tray before him waiting for the dentist to come in. When he plowed through the door, it was as if Michael Myers from Halloween had entered dressed in a hockey mask and gray coveralls. At last Steve Martin, the dentist, dispensed a jolt of heart-stopping pain and suffering with a foot-long needle that he buried and twisted into the victim’s gums while leaning on his chest with his knee like he was trying to penetrate concrete. The dentist grabbed a pair of De Walt 12 inch Channel Lock pliers and fastened on to one of his molars. He clamped down on it with all his might. The cracking enamel sounded like a walnut shell splitting as he twisted the tooth from the bone and yanked it through his gums.
Dr. J teaches other dentists all over Latin and South America how to do implants. So I essentially felt nothing with the 2 extractions, the bone grafts, or the abutments he implanted. I would say that procedure took a little over an hour. I had conjured up mind-boggling suffering and writhing. Driving over to Los Algodones that morning was like traveling by boxcar to Auschwitz-Birkenau. But my fears were unfounded. I was relaxed with no pain during or even afterward.
Implants are expensive. A friend of mine had one a few years ago in Santa Barbara. $5,500. Another friend went to LA for had every tooth removed from his skull and replaced with implants. $80,000! That’s right. $20,000 less than $100,000. Dental implants are about $4800 per tooth and can go as high as $6700. Dr. J told me they are about $5,500 in San Bernardino, higher in Palm Springs. According to one survey, 90% of people cannot afford them. Dr. J told me that an implant in Mexico is about $3,000. This is the reason seniors do “dental tourism.”
But I still wasn't done. I thought I had pretty much just gone through the Evel Knievel feat of flying over the 14 Greyhound buses at Kings Island and landing safely, but little did I know that Snake River Canyon was still ahead of me. Ten E-max crowns had to be installed. That required about ONE SOLID HOUR of NON-STOP DRILLING on 10 teeth, filing each of them down to a point through enamel that is so hard it even dulls diamonds. This enabled Dr. J to slip and cement E-max crowns over each of those teeth. There was NO PAIN, but it was stressful and intense. Anytime a dentist whips out the drill and installs a gadget on the end of it other than that fine needle point for fillings, you start getting into jack hammer territory, and you are going to thank the Lord when he mercifully stops. I didn't become rigid like a railroad track, but when he stopped, I felt as if I had been doing some heavy lifting at Golds Gym. Even he had to pause and take a break from it after a while.
If I had gone to a U.S. dentist for all the work I have described above, by estimates I have made from average dental costs listed on the Internet, my guess is that if I had eagerly quipped, “Let’s do it,” he would have said, “Would you excuse me for a moment? I’ll be right back.” Leaving the room nonchalantly as if he were going to get a bit for his drill, he then would have raced down the hall to his office, closed and locked the door behind him, sunk to his knees like the Apostle Paul and whispered, “Oh, God, thank you that he got here safely,” because the cost for all of that would have been about $32,000. In Mexico it came to about 25% or so of that price.
I came back to Los Algodones in November of 2020 to finish up the 2 implants that had been started 8 months previously. Two crowns were merely attached to the abutments. No big deal.
However, in November of 2020, another tooth was nominated for replacement. So Dr. J recommended another EBGI: EXTRACTION, BONE GRAFT, and IMPLANT. I buckled on the seat belt for one more round. In 19 minutes - yes, you read that correctly - in 19 minutes Dr. J extracted a molar, did a bone graft and inserted an implant abutment. The crown would be attached after the gum healed for 3 months. 19 MINUTES. Not a smidgen of pain with either procedure. That is efficiency and somebody who knows what he is doing.
Dr. J is a dental surgeon I would highly recommend to anyone who reads this. And so would many others. His wife and all his staff are compassionate people and will work to make you feel comfortable and without pain. Or fear. As he worked on me, we had a conversation about how he got into dentistry and how his skills had developed. Before he completed his studies as a dental surgeon, he had spent 6 years in California as a dental technician. Most dental surgeons don’t have that kind of invaluable experience. But it is all to your benefit, and you will notice it as I did. It gives a dentist insights into the peculiar fitting of implants, E-max crowns, and other applications into each individual mouth that a dentist without that experience does not have. As a result, he has his own lab at his office where he himself makes the crowns and implants he installs.
On the day the above took place, he celebrated his 41st birthday.
Dr. J’s office is 1100 miles from my house. I wouldn’t care if it was 3,000 miles. I am driving down there like a demon when I need a dentist because:
1. I get another vacation in Arizona and Mexico, and
2. After 64 years, I get another Blue Ribbon Day.
P.S. - If you are interested in dental tourism and would you like to contact Dr. J’s office for an appointment, let me know, and I will send you his contact information and web page that outlines their comprehensive and broad range of dental services, even free exams.
About 64 years ago, I had my last Blue Ribbon Day. Blue Ribbon Day was an event for grade schoolers at John G. Carlisle in Covington, Kentucky. On this day at the end of every school year, a Blue Ribbon inscribed with gold ink was bestowed upon you if you had gone through the gauntlet for the standard of grade school good health in the 1950s. This meant you had all your childhood vaccinations and exams and were declared to be qualified to inherit the Blue Ribbon health icon. Though a piece of blue satin stamped with gold coloring seems trivial, it was something elementary school students wanted. Those who did not get one were disappointed.
Now all this could go south on you unless you had ineluctably leaped the highest Blue Ribbon hurdle of all by prayerfully slinking tremulously into a dentist’s office and let him jab around and hook your teeth and gums with picks as he determined to find something to de-enamelize with his high pitch router that jarred your head and cavities when he leaned down on it after jabbing a 6 inch needle into your gums and jaw bone.
My dentist could have been the top enforcer for the Gambinos when they wanted somebody to spill the beans. If amateurs used a Die Hard battery hooked up to somebody's nipples, tongue, and family jewels when he was standing in a bucket of water while wearing copper shoes and that did not yield results, then all the Gambinos would have had to do was call in "The Closer", my dentist. He didn't need a trunk full of ancient, rusted implements from the Inquisition. All he had to bring with him was a tool that looked like it came off of Captain Hook's right hand. He used to poke around in every nook and cranny with that thing looking for exteme sensitivity. When he found a cavity, he would probe around in there a while, and then - as he withdrew it - he would pluck the edge of the tooth with a twang. You could hear that thing vibrate and hum like a tuning fork when he did that. At the same time, the room would light up like the Trinity nuclear test site at the White Sands National Monument in 1945. If anyone had any information to offer, he would sing like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
A few years ago I was slapped awake one night by Linda from a nightmare. When I awoke, I was on top of her with my hands around her neck. She told me that before she could wake me up, I screamed, "Where's that hook, you #&^%*$! I'l ram it . . . (etc)" I was seeing my old dentist's face, but I was trying to strangle Linda.
I have a Trinity of terrors. If I were to put them on an intensity meter, my fear of dark ocean waters would be about the level of my belt. Vipers would be at my hairline, and a dentist with a hook would be at the top of a redwood. I rued the hour The Blue Ribbon Day had ever been invented.
In his chambers I would seize the arms of the dental chair in a death grip like John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles when he buried his fingers into the dash board of his car. My back and stomach arched up off the chair like a rainbow as if a forest fire was under my pants and nearly touched the light the dentist was using to see where to inflict gawd-awful pain. When Linda was a little girl, she remembers being taken to a tooth-torturer who either had Parkinson’s Disease or the Palsy. His hands were clenched with tremors. He could only stop his left hand from trembling by wrapping her skull in a head lock while his router hand shook like Barney Fife drawing his gun in Mayberry.
In the cowboy movies, gunslingers in the 1800s sometimes had to stare down a dentist. They could call Wyatt Earp out into the street without breaking a sweat, but when came time to stagger over to the dentist’s office, the saloon and stiff drink was the first stop. They numbed their heads into wooden blocks with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a gallon of Osage Rub. Their nervous systems collapsed into convulsions when they retired into the dental chair as if they were sitting naked in a freezer on a block of ice. The pain of tearing rotten teeth from inflamed gums and pushing a drill into a raw nerve to fill a cavity without sedative was the equivalent of a Biblical crucifixion.
So for all of us who crossed the finish line on Blue Ribbon Day, it was like we had been taken down from a cross. We had been through an excruciating hell and now had a year’s reprieve before the tribunals began again.
Our experience in the 2008 housing crisis in Florida made the affordability of seeing a dentist impossible at the time. So a number of years passed without dental intervention.
But in 2014 when we were Activity Directors in Tucson at an RV resort, we became aware of thousands of seniors pouring over the Mexican border to submit to world-class tormentors who could compete with the world’s most elite dental fiends. They have a phrase for this. It’s called “dental tourism.” People travel all over the world to other countries for first-class dentistry at bargain prices for dentists trained in the U.S. and at the top medical schools and universities in their own countries. They use the latest technology, and their prices are a FRACTION of those in the United States. Many Americans, South Americans, Europeans, and Canadians flee to Mexico. A Los Algodones web site says you will save 40-70% on most procedures over prices back home.
So the years went by. In December of 2019, I made this statement to Linda. “When we go to Arizona in February, let’s go to a dentist down in Mexico.” Although Linda had heard the same thing about Mexican dentists as I had, that comment to her sounded as if I was saying, “There’s a dental sadist in Mexico without any credentials or experience, but he is performing excruciating dental experiments at bargain basement prices. What do you say we go see him?”
To my daughter this sounded like I was making an appointment with a prison dentist on Rikers Island or at a community dental clinic where interns practiced for free on guinea pigs who had more guts than money.
You can cross the border at many points for these appointments. But we chose Yuma because a friend of mine had been going to an exceptional dentist in Mexico for 13 years just across the California border in Los Algodones, Baja, California, Mexico. Los Algodones is a popular border town destination of 5400 people for medical tourism. Why so? It offers more pharmacies, doctors, dentists, and opticians in a concentrated area THAN ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. Now that last sentence alone should get your attention. They have about 6 or 7 physicians, about 20 optometrists, and 500 dental offices with 2,000 dentists. This place is obsessed with inflicting all the designs and technology of dental excruciation upon thousands of people who need it. That is why it is informally known as Molar City.
With reluctance, I called them on the phone to make an appointment. I wasn’t sure when I was coming, but the receptionist told me,“When you get to Yuma, call me back.” I had never heard that before because making an appointment with a dentist in the US was like waiting for the answer to a revenue question from Turbo Tax. In the US, once you had the appointment, you could be suspended in torment for weeks waiting for it because you couldn't stop thinking about it day and night.
When I got to Yuma, I called again, and she said, “Do you want to come today?”
In Mexico, you can go to the dentist the day you call or You Can Even Waltz In without an appointment, and they will see you. I chose the next day because I had been mentally harassed about it for years, and I wanted peace. Knowing I had to go to a dentist eventually was like hearing the beating heart beneath the floor boards in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Proceeding across the Mexican border as soon as possible was kin to the conscience-clearing confession of murder and ripping the body out of hiding.
Yuma is right on the Colorado River, which is the Arizona/California border. As you enter into California, for the next 7 miles advertising billboards about dentists assault your fears once more before you exit I-8 and go south about 2 miles where you either enter Mexico with your car or drive into this huge Disney World parking lot on the US side for a fee of $6.00. Hundreds of senior citizens from their 50s to their 90s are plodding through the gate into Los Algodones.
When you cross the border, the place turns into a Midway. Relentless, loquacious circus barkers are in your face out on the street in front of medical offices and souvenir shops vying for your attention and probably a commission too. But the dentists totally dominate the scene. I never could get an exact number, but I asked several people how many freaking dentists were in this joint, and I heard numbers anywhere from 500-1500. As you gaze around at all the commotion and people yelling in this Mexican bazaar, you ears are inundated with a cacophony of mixed retail jargon being shouted out all around you, like “root canals, belts, implants, holsters, cleanings, whips, dentures, hats, fillings, serapes, bridges, bifocals, and necklaces.” The whole place is an intense sales market designed for financial extraction.
So you must come with a recommendation, or you will have no idea where to go or who to trust. You are surrounded by confusion. I had done my research and had that recommendation. I was confident our choice was sound. In fact, we had heard that dentists came from Los Angeles to see the man we were going to see, Dr. J.
His office was a perfectly safe 4 block walk from the gate. Lots of people and shops lined the way. They will pick you up in a car at the gate if you wish, even from Yuma or El Centro if you fly in and don't rent a car. The reception area would have passed for many American dental offices, as the picture attached to this article shows.
After we went in, introduced ourselves, and sat down, some guy in a black medical smock and a pair of blue jeans came out, introduced himself, and shook hands. He was an engaging, disarming soul. It was Dr. J himself, the dental surgeon. I had never had a white-coated dental commandant from the Schutzstaffel emerge from behind the sound-proof doors in the back where pain and misery were both muffled and dispensed and greet me before. And in blue jeans, no less.
Linda was jerked to attention in just minutes and called to give an account of herself first. After about15-25 minutes, she got some X-rays and an explanation of what she needed along with a price sheet of the recommended procedures. Price: just over $800. That included a cleaning, a root canal, and a new crown. Then they dragged her into the back again and started in. She was done in 2 hours. Three days later she was back to complete the crown. Now she could relax.
Mexican dentists get down to business. You won’t dwell on nightmare visions of an additional level of Dante’s hell prepared just for you. You aren’t dangled for weeks in an envelope of terror while you conjure up the worst nightmares dentistry has to offer. They show you the X-rays, explain them, give you the total, and immediately proceed to the finish line. They are efficient. You don’t come back 50 times and stretch it out. You don’t have time to change your underwear or put on layers of deodorant or visit a prayer room or go to Mass or repent of grievous sins that you suspect are the reasons you are here. None of that. You are in and you are out.
Then came my turn. Same thing. They took X-rays, explained them, and handed me a list of procedures needed with a cost analysis. It looked bad, but I swallowed hard and made the executive decision by firmly stating, “Let’s do it.” In less than an hour, the first pound of the hammer came down: a root canal and a filling. THAT DAY. The needle, Novocain, and drill was virtually painless. I felt nothing. Instead of becoming an iron bar with neck, arms, torso and legs hard and taut as if I had been frozen solid on ice, I could sense the curvature of the chair breath me.
However, my ordeal was just beginning. Little did I know that we were starting out with the easy stuff. The screws of anxiety were just beginning to turn. All this was done on a Wednesday. I was due back on Saturday for what I thought was the main event, which brought me straight up out of the bed a few times at 3 am. That’s because they PREPARED me for 3 days with some pre-medication for an EBGI: EXTRACTION, BONE GRAFT, and IMPLANT. I had seen commercials of implants on TV with some guy using a ratchet to screw what looked like a lag bolt into somebody’s head and gums while I swallowed hard and said, “Oh, crap, I hope I never have to have that.”
When I first saw the words “2 extractions, 2 bone grafts, and 2 implants” on the list of recommended procedures, all I could picture was that patient in Little Shop of Horrors with his finger nails buried into the over head plaster while he hung from the ceiling like Spider Man trembling in terror above a dental chair. He had been sitting alone in the chair with his thoughts, pounding heart, and sweaty hands looking at all the Medieval torture tools laid out on the tray before him waiting for the dentist to come in. When he plowed through the door, it was as if Michael Myers from Halloween had entered dressed in a hockey mask and gray coveralls. At last Steve Martin, the dentist, dispensed a jolt of heart-stopping pain and suffering with a foot-long needle that he buried and twisted into the victim’s gums while leaning on his chest with his knee like he was trying to penetrate concrete. The dentist grabbed a pair of De Walt 12 inch Channel Lock pliers and fastened on to one of his molars. He clamped down on it with all his might. The cracking enamel sounded like a walnut shell splitting as he twisted the tooth from the bone and yanked it through his gums.
Dr. J teaches other dentists all over Latin and South America how to do implants. So I essentially felt nothing with the 2 extractions, the bone grafts, or the abutments he implanted. I would say that procedure took a little over an hour. I had conjured up mind-boggling suffering and writhing. Driving over to Los Algodones that morning was like traveling by boxcar to Auschwitz-Birkenau. But my fears were unfounded. I was relaxed with no pain during or even afterward.
Implants are expensive. A friend of mine had one a few years ago in Santa Barbara. $5,500. Another friend went to LA for had every tooth removed from his skull and replaced with implants. $80,000! That’s right. $20,000 less than $100,000. Dental implants are about $4800 per tooth and can go as high as $6700. Dr. J told me they are about $5,500 in San Bernardino, higher in Palm Springs. According to one survey, 90% of people cannot afford them. Dr. J told me that an implant in Mexico is about $3,000. This is the reason seniors do “dental tourism.”
But I still wasn't done. I thought I had pretty much just gone through the Evel Knievel feat of flying over the 14 Greyhound buses at Kings Island and landing safely, but little did I know that Snake River Canyon was still ahead of me. Ten E-max crowns had to be installed. That required about ONE SOLID HOUR of NON-STOP DRILLING on 10 teeth, filing each of them down to a point through enamel that is so hard it even dulls diamonds. This enabled Dr. J to slip and cement E-max crowns over each of those teeth. There was NO PAIN, but it was stressful and intense. Anytime a dentist whips out the drill and installs a gadget on the end of it other than that fine needle point for fillings, you start getting into jack hammer territory, and you are going to thank the Lord when he mercifully stops. I didn't become rigid like a railroad track, but when he stopped, I felt as if I had been doing some heavy lifting at Golds Gym. Even he had to pause and take a break from it after a while.
If I had gone to a U.S. dentist for all the work I have described above, by estimates I have made from average dental costs listed on the Internet, my guess is that if I had eagerly quipped, “Let’s do it,” he would have said, “Would you excuse me for a moment? I’ll be right back.” Leaving the room nonchalantly as if he were going to get a bit for his drill, he then would have raced down the hall to his office, closed and locked the door behind him, sunk to his knees like the Apostle Paul and whispered, “Oh, God, thank you that he got here safely,” because the cost for all of that would have been about $32,000. In Mexico it came to about 25% or so of that price.
I came back to Los Algodones in November of 2020 to finish up the 2 implants that had been started 8 months previously. Two crowns were merely attached to the abutments. No big deal.
However, in November of 2020, another tooth was nominated for replacement. So Dr. J recommended another EBGI: EXTRACTION, BONE GRAFT, and IMPLANT. I buckled on the seat belt for one more round. In 19 minutes - yes, you read that correctly - in 19 minutes Dr. J extracted a molar, did a bone graft and inserted an implant abutment. The crown would be attached after the gum healed for 3 months. 19 MINUTES. Not a smidgen of pain with either procedure. That is efficiency and somebody who knows what he is doing.
Dr. J is a dental surgeon I would highly recommend to anyone who reads this. And so would many others. His wife and all his staff are compassionate people and will work to make you feel comfortable and without pain. Or fear. As he worked on me, we had a conversation about how he got into dentistry and how his skills had developed. Before he completed his studies as a dental surgeon, he had spent 6 years in California as a dental technician. Most dental surgeons don’t have that kind of invaluable experience. But it is all to your benefit, and you will notice it as I did. It gives a dentist insights into the peculiar fitting of implants, E-max crowns, and other applications into each individual mouth that a dentist without that experience does not have. As a result, he has his own lab at his office where he himself makes the crowns and implants he installs.
On the day the above took place, he celebrated his 41st birthday.
Dr. J’s office is 1100 miles from my house. I wouldn’t care if it was 3,000 miles. I am driving down there like a demon when I need a dentist because:
1. I get another vacation in Arizona and Mexico, and
2. After 64 years, I get another Blue Ribbon Day.
P.S. - If you are interested in dental tourism and would you like to contact Dr. J’s office for an appointment, let me know, and I will send you his contact information and web page that outlines their comprehensive and broad range of dental services, even free exams.