My lucky day

**Désolée, un autre long billet non traduit... 

Last week, before we arrived in Tucson at our friends Pascale and Anton's, I was ready to write about a series of unfortunate events... Nothing major, but just not a great week... Just after we came back from our sunrise hike in the Grand Canyon, Aïsha banged my coffee and it fell over my laptop... JF spent the week trying to clean it and reanimate it, but it showed no vital signs... We spent the week sharing one computer (at a very busy time of year in terms of work for us) and started considering shopping for a new computer... until our friend Anton told us to hold off till we arrive at his place since he had saved a couple of computers before... 

Two days later, the trailer's fridge opened and everything fell on the floor. The big jar of hemp seed oil opened and there was a mess of oil and broken eggs everywhere (we were slipping all over the place trying to clean the floor...). And to make things worst, another cupboard containing the girls travel drawing journals and books opened too and Mathilde's journal was soaked in oil, as well as other precious things...

And since all good things come in three, my front tooth crown started to get loose... just at the same time of year that it did in Italy 16 years ago, when I was eating an ortolana pizza in Piazza del Duomo with friends... and since in the country of La Dolce Vità, dentists offices are (at least they were in my area 16 years ago...) closed over the holidays, I spent the family gatherings with a missing front tooth...!

:: You can clearly see the crown on that photo/On voit bien la couronne sur cette photo ::

Anton worked his magic on my computer and it came back to life! Only the keyboard was dead. We ordered a new one for $20 and my computer is like new! Yeah!! At least, I had a backup of pretty much everything, unlike when my pawn-shop bought first-generation laptop (orange characters on black background, at least 40 pounds and as thick as a Robert Collins...) crashed a week before I had to hand in my semester's project for my creative writing class, my autobiography, 6 chapters of 15 to 20 pages each... And of course, I had no backup... and no paper copy... I remember feeling my heart sank really, really low...

But that front tooth was getting looser and I had to take care of it... There was no way it was going to wait for my return in Quebec at the end of June, when I was scheduled to have a new crown put in (for about $1500). I googled top dentists in Tucson, Arizona, and found a few names, made some research, and booked an appointement. When I entered the office with my worn-off birkies and discolored yoga pants, I knew I was not their typical client... The receptionnist (the dentist's wife) was incredibly elegant and there was a perfectly combed poodle with painted toenails (!!) wearing a fresh water pearl necklace, playing around the antique dentist chair and tools in the corner, beside the amazingly comfortable leather chairs in the waiting room. But on the basis of my experience of wisdom tooth pulling in Montreal in my university years (where I simply opened the phone book and picked the closest dentist I could find and ended up in the office of a butcher, and was in atrocious pain for a good week...), I'd rather be in a high-end dentist office, looking kind of out of place.

I waited for the perfectly groomed lady with strong perfume and a very big hair brushing to be done telling the dentist's wife all about her golden zumba class, then I filled and signed an incredible amount of forms (it felt pretty cool to write 12/12/12 everywhere!). The old dentist was nice and funny and very professionnally explained to me all the options. He took an x-ray and said there were good chances the root was broken. My options were complicated and very pricey (you cannot put a new crown in place - or recement the existing one even if it is still in good shape - if the root is broken). We were looking at a flipper (temporary removable tooth with a plastic palate), implant or bridge ($5000!!!). Needless to say, none of those options were very appealing... He said he could try to pull it out to see if it was broken... but there was a big risk he could not put it back in its spot.... but the only other option was to keep it like that and wait for it to fall off... or to have a bad infection... 

This is when I forgot rule number one of discussing with Americans you don't know: never talk about religion or politics, especially with your dentist when he is doing a delicate procedure in your mouth... Well, he sort of went after it... When I told him my holistic dentist back home could replace the crown for $1500 (half his price), he said I needed to compare apples with apples. I told him it was one of the top clinics in my area... He said everybody says that... Then he started being all worked up and said I could go to Asia and get a new crown for $27! I tried to explain to him that the health care system in Canada was simply more funded, that the procedure itself probably costed the same price, but that the clients paid less than here... 


He pulled a bit with a tool and the crown came off, all in one piece, still in perfect shape. He said it was my lucky day, that in 32 years of career he never saw that happening! 


Then he went into saying how much taxes we have to pay up there (and I had to agree...)... He cleaned the crown and said he could recement it and it would be like a new one. While he was holding it in place and I could not say a word and he went on and on about the Canadian government... When I could finally close my mouth, I remembered reading on his website that he specialized in gold fillings, something I had researched quite a bit before having all my mercury fillings replaced last year (I am totally pro-gold, but could not find any dentist doing that in Quebec... and probably could not have afforded them either), but I got him to talk about his specialty, and his sarcasm died down... and he actually said my dentist back home did a great job with the composite fillings... that they actually were much nicer than the ones he used to see... All was good again. He shook my hand and said that I was probably good for another 20 years! Total cost: $300! Am I lucky or what?