Death of a Friend's Dad / Braces-On Fisasco / Introducing Nicole
A week and a half ago, the father of my best friend from high school, Bryan, died after a violent heart attack following years of battling heart failure. We've all known that the end could be near at any moment, so while that makes the passing a little less of an impact, it is a passing none the less. Last Saturday, Bryan and his family held a celebration of life wake at a local wildlife preserve and for a moment, the typical Oregon clouds and rain cleared up revealing a simply gorgeous afternoon. I represented my family and attended, getting a chance to talk to his family. My own family had sent a modest flower arrangement and I was floored to see is was used front and center with the departed's wooden urn. That really kinda touched me. I did know the guy and it pains me that I didn't get a proper chance to say goodbye but I think it's okay. If anything, he knew that lately whenever I came over to visit, it wasn't to say goodbye to him one more time, it was to say hello one more time.
So I got my dental braces put on Yesterday afternoon at an orthodontics office I was referred to by my regular dentist. I'm paying extra for brackets that are clear so I was excited that they'd be barely noticeable. Once I arrived, they immediately had me in an office signing paperwork and handing over a check for $4,500 which included the extra charge for the clear brackets. The installation itself was a fairly quick and simple thing. They had the brackets ready for both sets of my teeth set into little trays. They put a kind of bonding glue on my teeth, set the trays in, pressed the brackets into each tooth, pulled the trays off, cured the bonding glue and voila! They then inlayed the metal wire, clipped each bracket, and the process was complete! Pretty wild! I was excited!
But then they handed me a mirror.
To my horror, all the braces they'd installed and finished gluing down were metal. Silver, horrible, ugly metal. I stopped the nurse as she was preparing to leave and I asked her about the clear ones. "What happened to the clear brackets I was supposed to get? You know, the ones I paid many hundreds of dollars extra for?" She looked at my records and my bill and, sheepishly, admitted that I was indeed supposed to have clear brackets. She claimed this happens on occasion. I can't understand how, since getting the clear brackets is the ONLY customizable option available to people getting braces. This can't be that easy to screw up, can it? It's like amputating the wrong arm in a surgical setting: Stopping to double check the procedure for ten seconds would have shown her what I was supposed to have done. The dental assistant's solution was to schedule me for a future appointment to have them replaced (Possibly at my expense) and that I was going to just have to live with their mistake for a few weeks. A million disappointed thoughts ran through my head. The one that rang loudest was: They had no trouble remembering to bill me extra for the clear brackets but actually remembering to install them was too much work. And I was so excited to finally be getting braces, too. It really took out the wind behind my sails.
Suddenly, the dentist who operated the facility appeared. Apologizing profusely, he told me they were gonna fix things right then. He immediately had me back in the chair and began popping off the metal brackets one by one. He then had to grind and polish the residual bonded glue off each tooth. No time for Novocain. I didn't expect the pain and I realized later that I had clung my hands to my chest so tightly that I had warped the fabric of my shirt from sweat and pressure. The dentist then set new bonding glue in place and, one by one, measured and inlayed the clear brackets I had paid for. This took a while longer since he was "free-handing" the installation of the brackets because there was no tray to guide placement. Each one had to be measured and set in just the right spot. All the while, the dentist is trying to make small talk like an embarrassed teenager. Something about golf and something about installing TVs for patients. I just was NOT in the mood and I really didn't pay attention. What can I say? I didn't want to hear their patronization. I stared blankly up at their boring ceiling and waited for them to fix their silly stupid amateurish mistake.
Once they were done and I was okay to leave, I was rather quiet and short with them. They showed me how to take care of the braces and gave me a bag of supplies but I barely replied. The last thing I said was to the nurse telling her to double check these things in the future. It's not hard. Think about what you're doing before you do it. Thankfully, putting on the correct brackets only took an extra 15 minutes and in the end, there wasn't any true harm done. But the fact that it happened at all has soured my excitement. Now that the pain and discomfort of having braces has begun to appear, I'm even more disheartened. I go back in eight weeks for an adjustment and I think by then I'll have collected my thoughts and maybe I'll remind them that I'm going to be a scrutinizing patient from now on. I will shame them to their faces if it could prevent this from happening to someone else. Such a stupid, brain-dead mistake to make.
In much more positive and awesome news, I think I'm ready to begin talking about a girl I'm potentially going to date in the near future. Over the last three months, I've been on a couple dating websites meeting and talking to dozens of girls. At one point, I was chatting up six women and three weeks ago, I was actually seeing three different girls. But now, one of them has really stepped up and taken center stage. So much so that I've actually told a couple other women from the dating websites that I'm now off the market and I think I'm going to shut down those accounts. Her name is Nicole and she's a freshly graduated 24-year-old beauty who makes me feel important and fascinating. She recently got out of a rough long-term relationship and I can sense her personality, warmth, and talent have been stifled by the former boyfriend. I've had her over to my apartment a dozen times now and each time we expose a little bit more about our personalities. On Monday while she was here, I showed her a bunch of the student films I was involved with from my time in college and she was enamored. Both with the quality of the productions but also in my total embarrassment at showing them. We're going to play this VERY slow. We're not so much dating right now as we're just building a friendship and being social together. A couple months from now, it might get a little serious and we may become official, but we're concerned most with just being friends and having that as the basis for the relationship. I'm so excited. The Internet really is a great place to meet people!
So I got my dental braces put on Yesterday afternoon at an orthodontics office I was referred to by my regular dentist. I'm paying extra for brackets that are clear so I was excited that they'd be barely noticeable. Once I arrived, they immediately had me in an office signing paperwork and handing over a check for $4,500 which included the extra charge for the clear brackets. The installation itself was a fairly quick and simple thing. They had the brackets ready for both sets of my teeth set into little trays. They put a kind of bonding glue on my teeth, set the trays in, pressed the brackets into each tooth, pulled the trays off, cured the bonding glue and voila! They then inlayed the metal wire, clipped each bracket, and the process was complete! Pretty wild! I was excited!
But then they handed me a mirror.
To my horror, all the braces they'd installed and finished gluing down were metal. Silver, horrible, ugly metal. I stopped the nurse as she was preparing to leave and I asked her about the clear ones. "What happened to the clear brackets I was supposed to get? You know, the ones I paid many hundreds of dollars extra for?" She looked at my records and my bill and, sheepishly, admitted that I was indeed supposed to have clear brackets. She claimed this happens on occasion. I can't understand how, since getting the clear brackets is the ONLY customizable option available to people getting braces. This can't be that easy to screw up, can it? It's like amputating the wrong arm in a surgical setting: Stopping to double check the procedure for ten seconds would have shown her what I was supposed to have done. The dental assistant's solution was to schedule me for a future appointment to have them replaced (Possibly at my expense) and that I was going to just have to live with their mistake for a few weeks. A million disappointed thoughts ran through my head. The one that rang loudest was: They had no trouble remembering to bill me extra for the clear brackets but actually remembering to install them was too much work. And I was so excited to finally be getting braces, too. It really took out the wind behind my sails.
Suddenly, the dentist who operated the facility appeared. Apologizing profusely, he told me they were gonna fix things right then. He immediately had me back in the chair and began popping off the metal brackets one by one. He then had to grind and polish the residual bonded glue off each tooth. No time for Novocain. I didn't expect the pain and I realized later that I had clung my hands to my chest so tightly that I had warped the fabric of my shirt from sweat and pressure. The dentist then set new bonding glue in place and, one by one, measured and inlayed the clear brackets I had paid for. This took a while longer since he was "free-handing" the installation of the brackets because there was no tray to guide placement. Each one had to be measured and set in just the right spot. All the while, the dentist is trying to make small talk like an embarrassed teenager. Something about golf and something about installing TVs for patients. I just was NOT in the mood and I really didn't pay attention. What can I say? I didn't want to hear their patronization. I stared blankly up at their boring ceiling and waited for them to fix their silly stupid amateurish mistake.
Once they were done and I was okay to leave, I was rather quiet and short with them. They showed me how to take care of the braces and gave me a bag of supplies but I barely replied. The last thing I said was to the nurse telling her to double check these things in the future. It's not hard. Think about what you're doing before you do it. Thankfully, putting on the correct brackets only took an extra 15 minutes and in the end, there wasn't any true harm done. But the fact that it happened at all has soured my excitement. Now that the pain and discomfort of having braces has begun to appear, I'm even more disheartened. I go back in eight weeks for an adjustment and I think by then I'll have collected my thoughts and maybe I'll remind them that I'm going to be a scrutinizing patient from now on. I will shame them to their faces if it could prevent this from happening to someone else. Such a stupid, brain-dead mistake to make.
In much more positive and awesome news, I think I'm ready to begin talking about a girl I'm potentially going to date in the near future. Over the last three months, I've been on a couple dating websites meeting and talking to dozens of girls. At one point, I was chatting up six women and three weeks ago, I was actually seeing three different girls. But now, one of them has really stepped up and taken center stage. So much so that I've actually told a couple other women from the dating websites that I'm now off the market and I think I'm going to shut down those accounts. Her name is Nicole and she's a freshly graduated 24-year-old beauty who makes me feel important and fascinating. She recently got out of a rough long-term relationship and I can sense her personality, warmth, and talent have been stifled by the former boyfriend. I've had her over to my apartment a dozen times now and each time we expose a little bit more about our personalities. On Monday while she was here, I showed her a bunch of the student films I was involved with from my time in college and she was enamored. Both with the quality of the productions but also in my total embarrassment at showing them. We're going to play this VERY slow. We're not so much dating right now as we're just building a friendship and being social together. A couple months from now, it might get a little serious and we may become official, but we're concerned most with just being friends and having that as the basis for the relationship. I'm so excited. The Internet really is a great place to meet people!