good people

I [heart] my dentist. Yeah, he's good with the teeth and he's a Red Sox fan. . The icing on the cake is that he's a good guy too.

The flipside of the story is that every time I see the line between the haves (raising my hand, that's me) and the have-nots (the refugees--except the young ones who'll learn enough English to get good jobs) I'm worried for my country. Heck the refugees are even plugged into a system. They actually have minimal of health insurance. The people without any sort of health insurance**......no, I would rather think about my dentist just now.

Last Wednesday, Senija was in terrible pain. She's been in terrible pain before--and it's her tooth. Her dentist can't see her until April or May--she's on state aid and practically no one takes it. Senija could barely eat or talk she's in such pain. So I called my dentist.

The receptionist apologized that they couldn't see her until the next day. Thursday we slid through the snow and showed up about a half hour late at the office. No problem.

"Oh, whoops," said the receptionist when Senija handed over the card. "I thought you said she worked for the state. We don't take welfare." I started to say I'd take care of it****. The receptionist--who is unfailingly cheerful in a manner that doesn't even annoy people with toothaches--said "we'll work it out."

A half hour later, Senija's got an x-ray of her bad tooth, a prescription for antibiotics, and a piece of paper with a diagnosis for the oral surgeon. She needs to have it out. Of course if she was one of us "have" types, she'd get a root canal and save the tooth, but no, no, sorry. Back to the dentist.

"No charge," he says. "It's a snow day special."

See that's what I want to think about: how great individuals are.

The other stories I've heard and seen--the people sent home hours after an appendectomy because they don't have insurance, people who have to wait until they need emergency care because they can't pay for anything else, the kids with the blackened teeth who will wait years to get help, the hours and hours we spend in crowded waiting rooms with horrible chairs (and nothing to read but outdated STD pamphlets) . . . nope. Not today, batman!

Today is I love My Dentist Day. I told him I wish I could give him a big kiss. Poor guy looked way startled.

______


** okay so we've only had dental insurance for the last seven years--the difference between us haves and have nots before then was that we could pay for the care we needed.

**** Before you go all awww, what a nice Kate: I planned to work out some kind of house cleaning deal with Senija. I'm not as altruistic as I was seven years ago when I started the job. (Senija is the world's best house cleaner--she's given me lessons on how to do it but I'll never be as good as she is. She still has some kind of innate talent)...which leads me to
tangent #3
I bet you're rolling your eyes at the thought of it requiring "talent", but here's what I think: house cleaning is a female job and therefore people don't think of it in terms of talent or skill or intelligence. The argument is that house cleaning is a matter of training and nothing else. But I think that some people have more than training, they've got the "eye" -- some kind of skill in spades. I can't wait until this kind of skill becomes noted and valued by TPTB. Heh. It'll be great.

Of course to be raised to the Real World Of Skill it would have to have some kind of name--something to do with Interior Environmental Intelligence, eh? Oh this is worth a whole post on its own, but nah....

Comments

  1. I heart your dentist too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I heart your dentist as well. That was very, very kind.

    And I fear I'm in the negative values on the scale of interior emotional intelligence. I have walked through the house to discover that every single room has strange object strewn on the floor. Phillips screws, random pieces of paper, socks. Did I stop to pick them up? No. Negative values.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11:35 PM

    I'm with you on housecleaning. We've had bad ones, good ones, and great ones. The great ones actually turn your house into something you never knew existed.

    ReplyDelete

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