I Left My Tooth in Algodones
So there was this article back at the end of July in the New Yorker. Headline read:
Mexico’s Molar City Could Transform My Smile. Did I Want It To?
(if no NewYorker subscription)
I happened to have a friend in my community that had been to Algodones, Mexico to have his teeth worked on, and spoke positively about the experience.
And I had a toothache.
I made trips to my dentist, and the endodontist, and basically the prognosis was not good. You might use a root canal, a crown, etc to save it, or maybe not. So the story begins….
Teeth
Everyone has a dental story. Or I assume they do.
Mine began with Dr. Savicki, or at least that’s how I remember his name. My first dentist. Age 6 or so. Six cavities filled, no novacain. Never again my young brain told me.
Next time, age 16. Playing football, one of my lower front teeth, #28 to be exact, knocked out. Dentist put a temporary cap on it. Wasn’t replaced until my late 40s.
Next visit, 20 years old, living in San Francisco. Dr. Leslie “Les” Plack. I kid you not.
By my 40s I finally got in the habit. Which meant major periodontal surgery. I tell the story of giving a keynote speech somewhere a week after and the suture falling out mid speech, a little thread tickling my tongue as I gave forth on the power of digital storytelling.
Somehow I’d never got my wisdom teeth out, had my first crown at 66, and here at 68, I was facing a decision point. Fix or extract.
Having just retired there was some confusion with my dental insurance (turned out I had two insurers) and it seemed that my coverage was not going to cover this big event.
So the question became, should I go to Mexico?
And more to the point, didn’t that sound like an adventure?
Valenzuela Dentistry
I asked my friend who his dentist was. There are more than a six hundred dentists in Algodones (no one seems to know, that was what my driver told me, 620).
He said Dr. Valenzuela. So I looked him up. Turned out to be a her. Shame on me.
I emailed and she emailed back and asked for my most recent x-rays. Sure.
We set the date, Friday, September 26, 8 am in the morning.
I went about my business.
The week finally rolled around and I reached out to ask about by phone, how to find them, and how I would pay. The clerical person responded.
“When you arrive look for the orange van, we’ll bring you to the clinic.”
And payment?
“Oh, just come for the consultation, and then go back and bring the money in cash.”
Could be well over $1000, right?
“Yes, but no worries, we had a guy cross the border with $2400 just today?”
Call me cautious, but I said to myself, I am not so sure. $1000s of dollars in my pocket, crossing the border, getting into a van. What could go wrong?
So I texted my friend and said, is that how you did your payment work (I knew he had done several major procedures)? Did he have to be a money mule into Algodones?
“No way.”
Huh. “Is this the email and phone number you used for Valenzuela Dental Group?”
“Joe, that’s a different number, my guy was José Valenzuela. Cosmetic Implant and Dentristy Center.”
Ah hah.
So I called them, and well, I got the appointment that same morning.
Yuma/Algodones
I had miles on Southwest to get the ticket to Phoenix from Albuquerque and back. Found a good price for a rental car. And found a great price for a well rated hotel in Yuma.
Off I went.
If you are not someone that has much familiarity with border town culture, you might think, I am not quite sure about this. But knowing that 100s of thousands of people were making this same pilgrimage, I assumed it would be fairly straight ahead.
But I was also squeezing this into my very busy schedule so that meant a late flight out. It was made later by a few delays. It took a long time to get the car. I set off after 9 pm for the three hour drive from Phoenix to Yuma.
At some point, I started thinking about the motel I’d booked. Maybe I’d gone a bit cheap on that. Maybe I should for the one night, upgrade a bit? I did.
After a few hours sleep, I got up and dropped my bag at my original hotel. It was straight out of a Thelma and Louise road trip to Yuma. But…. I might need to come back the next day, and I obviously wanted to keep my expenses down.
Driving from Yuma across the Colorado river into California and making the left off Interstate 8 toward Algodones border crossing is a 20 minute drive.
At the end of the road you see the famous rust-colored border wall and the two flags, US and Mexico (US at half mast to honor Charlie Kirk, I noted). You park in a big lot. You walk maybe 200 yards to the crossing, a non-descript cement building. A nice woman smiles as you wave your passport at her, you cross into Mexico.
And nearby, as the receptionist had said, was a guy in a Maroon colored van. Four or five blocks around the endless rows of dentists, pharmacies, eyeglass purveyors, and border town trinket shops, I’m dropped at the dentist.
It had been awhile since I was on the US-Mexico border. My main impression was how much it had not changed over the decades of my life. Commerce is king really, the gulf between what things cost on one side, and on the other, created a natural desire for money to flow back and forth. So shopkeepers expand and expand, in this case dental shopkeepers. The other impression was that despite the anti-immigrant hysteria of the Trump Administration, and the idea of marauding hordes pressed against the US-Mexico border, this border at least was completely chill. At least on one Friday morning. Such is the arrangement.
The Procedure
After being checked in I put my head in a 360° x-ray machine. Then into the dentist chair. Almost immediately the 40” screen in front of me presented my mouth/head as a techno-calavera art piece. Wow.
The doctor came in. We discussed options. Extraction was decided on. I was told the price. Along with a cleaning.
They went to work. After the cleaning came ample novacain, came lots of drilling and yanking, a long screw appeared in the updated x-ray on the new parking space they created between Molars 1-3. I was in that funny space of feeling like I had four hands in my mouth, and just being amazed that it didn’t really hurt that much.
When we were done. I asked for a selfie.
Seemed only right.
They said that was it, no other work required. I had somewhat imagined a two day effort on all parts of my dental landscape. But no, not yet. At 68, they gave me the impression I might not have too many of these type of experiences left in my life.
So I returned to my motel, decided to leave it behind and take a place in Phoenix that night (ASU was playing TCU that night, maybe I could catch some college football?). And so here I am the next morning, writing up my experience.
The Point of the Story
I tell my workshop participants, the great thing about stories well told is they don’t need a summary. An explanatory coda. The story should imply a strong insight, but also imply many things to audiences that easily fill in the context.
As an Elderware story, I hope it doesn’t need too much explanation. Aging in the US healthcare system is a dance with affordability, quality, avoidance, self-care, and realism. The fact that 1.2 million US citizens cross the US-Mexico border for a dentist, many of them, as I saw on my little journey into Algodones, are in the later part of their lives, on fixed incomes and medicare which poorly covers dental procedures.
Did I save money? Actually, given the one procedure, and my travel expenses, probably not.
On the long drive into the night, I missed my turn off and went 15 minutes in the wrong direction before my map app caught my attention and turned me around. As I pulled off, to cross over and head back, an auto hauling trailer was making the turn ahead of me. On the back was a jeep, with a rear wheel cover with a slogan. “Live A Great Story”. Maybe that’s really all this dental adventure was about.
And of course I made a digital story about it.