Dentist

While at a health seminar the other day we found out about a different dentist in town. They had a pamphlet with their prices on it and they looked more affordable than most so we decided to give them a try.

The next time we were in town we booked an appointment for the following day. Rosalie wanted to get a cleaning and I wanted to get a cleaning as well as some whitening done.

The appointment was for 11 am and we arrived on time. Our dentist was a very nice young man named Eric and he was learning to speak English.

Rosalie went first as her appointment was only supposed to take fifteen minutes, while mine would take an hour. After about twenty minutes the dentist came and got me to sit with Rosalie as she also had a broken tooth, that he was going to fix there and then.

Before the process started, he had to fill in a questionnaire about our health. After answering all the questions he asked us to sign but he didn’t know the word for signature so we taught him that.

It was lucky that Rosalie’s Spanish was way better than his English so she could translate for both of us. I tried to keep up but still have a problem with understanding spoken Spanish.

During the process, he asked Rosalie to shower her mouth. We explained the word rinse and then he asked what the English word for tongue was. We told him and spelt it for him. Of course, being a Spanish speaker he tried to pronounce it phonetically and it came out something like: “tong u ee”. We told him to think of it as ‘tung’ and he was good with that; although he still pronounced it toong as ‘u’ in Spanish is pronounced ‘oo’

Eventually, it became my turn. He did the cleaning and started to do the whitening process. By this time we had been there for three hours and hadn’t eaten yet. We all decided to take a break and start again in one hour.

At 3:00, we showed up again at his office and the process eventually began. He said it would take about forty minutes but being Mexico it took just over an hour.

Because I’m able to speak a bit of Spanish even though I don’t hear it too well I decided to enter the conversation. I thought up a sentence asking the dentist if he remembered the three words we had taught him. He looked at me with a puzzled look on his face so I turned to Rosalie who did the same. I had screwed up horribly. Rosalie asked the question and he got two out of three while I got zero. I redemed myself the next day when I had to phone and cancel another appointment for the whitening, and managed the whole thing in Spanish.

In total, including lunch, the whole thing took about five and a half hours. We didn’t mind though as we liked the guy and he was very entertaining. We will see him again.