In 2007, I was assistant director of sales at the Raphael hotel on the Plaza. It was a strange…read moreposition, and every single one of the managers who'd worked there under a family-owned administration for nearly 30 years hated my stinking guts. When I bit down on a piece of metal that had made its way into my "employee lunch," and cracked a molar in half, I took it as a sign of things to come. A couple of weeks later, I was let go and escorted from the building. I didn't mind that part so much. It made me feel like some kind of super-villain. In the end, though, I still had this busted tooth.
Over the course of the next couple of years, the tooth would abscess, get infected, swell, etc... As one of the uninsured millions, I did my best to find antibiotics, pain-meds, and the like the only way I knew how. I even lanced the thing a couple of times on my own.
When it acted up most recently, I had finally had enough. You can't make money waiting tables when your entire head is throbbing and you want to attack everything with a pulse that manages to hove into your personal space.
Fortune smiled upon me, though, as one of my tables during a lunch shift just happened to be a group of dentists. Not only were they a great group of people (service industry approved, that is,) they made conversation with me. When my tooth pain inevitably came up, they dispatched with the embarrassment I felt from being uninsured and poor in about thirty seconds and invited me to have it looked at in their office.
The Northland Family Dentistry group operates out of an unassuming office in a strip mall just off North Oak Trafficway. It's an old-fashioned place. No computer screens around the place. No mouth cameras. Just a dentist chair and some confident, friendly, and funny workers who do their job quickly and capably.
Within a week of my first visit, my mouth was examined, x-rays were taken, and operated on. The tooth pain is finally gone, and at a price I could afford.
I'm a little ashamed I waited so long to get it handled, but like a lot of you, I'd rather deal with the pain than put myself in a dentist's chair. These guys made it really easy on me, and fixed my problems just as they'd promised.
I could not have been more satisfied with my experience. I now pass this information on to you so that, you, the poor and pained, can find some relief.
Good luck!
