Dental Work or Dental Work Plus New Furniture; Your Choice

I wrote about my wife’s dental issues and the likelihood that we would visit Cancun to get them fixed. Here’s some news: we made the trip, and we returned yesterday. My friend Mike was going because he had a freshly-shattered tooth, so we tagged along.

Things went very well, depending on what “well” means to you.

We took the cheapest flight we could find, which was not cheap at all. We went during the spring break rush, so we paid about twice what we would ordinarily have paid. We flew Spirit Airlines, which is famous for thin seats that don’t recline.

Spirit looked like a pretty good deal up front because the fare was relatively low, but they did a good job of catching up to real airlines. The fees were beyond belief. I paid over $80 each for our carry-on and suitcase. We also took a $100 hit, more or less, to be seated in the same row. Then Spirit tried to sell us wifi and bigger seats.

Here is what Spirit doesn’t know: my wife and I have made 5 other overseas trips since the start of 2021, and after multiple ordeals lasting more than 30 hours, neither one of us is impressed by problems that last two. I could stand in the aisle for two hours. It would mean nothing to me.

I should also add that while the seats were fixed in place, they seemed to lean back more than ordinary airline seats do before reclining. For two hours, they were not all that bad.

Spirit is a somewhat annoying airline to use, but it seems to work well for people who know what they’re doing and don’t need help.

Cancun hotels can be both affordable and reasonably pleasant. It looks like the key is to avoid the main tourist area. Our first room was included with our flight bundle, so it’s not possible to say what it cost, but Expedia listed it for $84 per day, so figure $100 after all the hidden stuff is added in. Again, spring break prices. We had a guard gate as well as a card that got us into and out of the hotel and the adjoining mall, so we felt pretty safe.

The hotel could have been cleaner. I saw the maid “washing” our used glasses and cups, and all she did was rinse them with hot water from the bathroom sink. Disturbing. The towels didn’t smell all that fresh, possibly because the hotel used some kind of greenie washing machines that harbor mildew.

At first, we stayed in a simple room. It was a little smaller than a typical Holiday Inn room, but it had a big balcony with a hot tub we didn’t use. We had access to a weird LG washing machine with no English instructions, and it didn’t work very well.

Later on, we moved to a suite for maybe $150 more, total. We had to extend our stay, so we moved in order to get more room and our own washer.

The staff was very nice. They weren’t always able to give us what we needed, but they did try.

One thing that surprised me was the wind noise at the hotel. There are times of year when the wind blows constantly in Cancun, and where we were, it made loud whistling noises as it hit our windows and balconies. You really need ear plugs and a white noise machine when it’s windy.

The noise from bars full of drunks was also bad. Nothing happens in Cancun until the afternoon. Before that, it’s like the whole place has a “Do not disturb” sign on it. I think all the tourists are drunk, hungover, and/or nauseous in the mornings. At night, horrible dance music starts blasting from every bar, at levels which definitely damages people’s hearing. It goes on until at least 4 a.m. Thankfully, while our hotel was not built to kill wind noise effectively, the sound from bars was blocked pretty well.

If you decide to get dental or medical treatment in Cancun, I would suggest using a hotel attached to a mall. The mall was a huge help. There was a big, clean store similar to a Walmart, and there were food options that weren’t too bad. Of course, the fast food was cheaper than it is in America, because Mexico never had the insane minimum wage revolution that resulted in hordes of American burger-flippers being fired and replaced by electronic kiosks.

The dental clinic provided “free” shuttles for trips among the airport, the hotel, and the clinic itself, so that saved us a lot of money and aggravation. We tipped the drivers something like $2.50 per trip anyway. They didn’t expect it. Other Americans jumped out of the shuttles and took off without looking back.

Digression: twice, we shared shuttles with an entire family that was there for dental work. There was a son who looked to be around 14. Very pale and thin, with long, twig-like arms. He had short hair, cut with clippers. He had tattoos, now that I think about it. Strange thing to do to a child.

The second time we saw this family, the son spoke. He had a wispy, high-pitched, feminine voice. I’m pretty sure he was a girl. I looked at her arms, and they hadn’t yet been skinned to make an artificial penis. I hope these people come to their senses before having their child mutilated beyond repair.

The clinic itself was slightly run-down, but at the same time, it had equipment worthy of NASA. They had machines I had never seen before. They had my wife put her head in a machine, and it created 3-D x-rays. That was amazing to me. My American dentist has nice x-ray machines, but he can’t take 3D models of my teeth and rotate and magnify them on a screen.

On the first day, we got her examined and x-rayed, and they gave us a plan. It all happened very quickly. I had been hoping for a single $1500 implant, but she needed an implant, at least two crowns, extractions for three impacted wisdom teeth (muelas del juicio), and a bunch of fillings. I’m not sure, but I think that during her childhood in Africa, she brushed her teeth mainly with grape soda.

She also needed a sinus lift. This is a procedure where they stick material in the floor of a sinus in order to build up the bone for an implant.

In the US, an implant alone is about $5000, and a sinus lift will run you at least $1500, so $6500 at best. A crown will cost $1500 or more. Pulling the wisdom teeth would have cost nearly $2000. Overall, treatment in the US would probably have cost us $15000. They told us we were on the hook for $5850, and I jumped at it.

Sadly, we had to extend our trip. We were hoping to be there for under three days, but because of the unexpected issues, including an infection that had to be killed with antibiotics before the sinus lift, we had to stay nearly a whole week. At first we were in a room, but we spent our last three days in a suite with two bedrooms.

I will be honest. I think the people who worked on my wife are much more able than every dentist I’ve seen in America. They have more experience. They do major procedures all day, 6 days a week. No one goes to Cancun for a cleaning; they go because they have big problems. The Mexicans have oral surgeons in their clinics, full time. How many implants does your dentist do? Maybe three a week? How much oral surgery does he do? Probably not much, and maybe none. Practice makes perfect, and the dentists and oral surgeon we saw get tons of practice.

They did a fantastic job with medication. When I got my wisdom teeth pulled in Miami, they sent me home with a prescription for Vicodin and wished me luck. In Cancun, they prescribed tramadol and ketolorac for pain, dexamethasone for inflammation and swelling, azithromycin for infection, nasal spray for congestion, and a special mouth rinse to prevent problems after the procedures. They gave us detailed, printed instructions to guide my wife during the recovery process.

My wife had no real pain during her visits, and the drugs kept her happy back at the hotel.

Mexican pharmacies are really interesting. They will give you nearly anything without a prescription, and the medicines are real, made by reputable companies. On top of all this, they don’t keep prescription slips, so if you want, you can fill your prescription more than once. This would be very, very useful if you lived in a place like America, where doctors treat all people in pain like criminals, and you wanted to keep painkillers on hand for future emergencies. You could get a prescription filled more than once, use the pills you needed, and take the rest home to save for a bad day. Of course, I would never do anything like that. But you could.

You probably don’t need a prescription for ketolorac or tramadol in Mexico, though.

They will also sell you steroids. In fact, they will try to get you to buy them even if you don’t want them. Steroids and Viagra. Steroids and Viagra. Step right up. Buy all you want. I considered getting some deca durabolin in case I needed to have the wife move some downed trees.

We didn’t buy anything the dentists didn’t prescribe, but I might get some stuff next time. Efudex is a good thing to have if you live in Florida. I already have some tubes Mike brought me from Cancun. If you get a bump you think could be a precancer, you slap Efudex on it, and it goes away, even if it’s already cancerous. You can’t use it for melanoma, but it kills the other types of skin cancer. Much better than being sliced up for nothing.

The food in Cancun was acceptable. That’s all I can say. We went to a seafood place on the beach between appointments, and I had some tacos featuring tempura-style fish that tasted sharky. We also hit some American fast food places in the mall, along with some Mexican food court joints. We ate at an Italian restaurant and a place that served Mexican food to locals.

Some of the food was downright bad. Most was okay. The Mexican place, Flor de Lis, served authentic food, which is a little different from American-style Mexican. The flavors were more subdued, but everything was good. I would go again.

We found an Indian place that was very good. Not the best we’ve ever had, but well worth visiting again. The name is Patravali.

I learned a lot of Spanish in the few days I spent in Cancun. More than I learned in decades in Miami, to be honest, perhaps because I had a natural desire to be a good guest. In Miami, I always felt, correctly, that Americans should never feel obligated to learn Spanish in order to live in America among ungrateful and thoughtless immigrants. In Mexico, a lot of sentences surprised me by emerging from my mouth. My wife thought I spoke Spanish.

Immersion really works. This is something leftist can’t learn. They waste billions of tax dollars enabling Latins who don’t want to learn English. They could be helping them learn by cutting off the coddling.

I never enjoyed trying to speak Spanish in the past, and I never had any real enthusiasm for it, but while I was in Mexico, it was more appealing to me.

Leave me there for a month, and I’ll be a Spanish speaker. I won’t be ready to teach Spanish in a university, but my Spanish will be adequate. I will do what many immigrants in the US are too sorry to do.

Mexicans themselves were helpful and polite, and that includes the ones who weren’t getting our money. Strangers helped us all the time. They translated for us. They gave us information. Everyone said the Spanish versions of “thank you” and “excuse me.” They were much, much nicer than people are in most of America. That doesn’t include the county where I live.

On the down side, three American girls were held prisoner and robbed at gunpoint by Mexican cops while we were there, so even though people were polite, Cancun is still Mexico.

Three young women were on the beach. They were approached by several men, some of whom were wearing police uniforms and holding machine guns. They told the girls they were trespassing and demanded $300 to let them go. One girl was released to go to their hotel for the money. Once the bribe was in hand, the girls were allowed to leave.

The news said the thieves were dressed like police. Um…no. They were police. No one in his right mind would dress as a cop in Cancun and wander around in the open with a machine gun. The real cops are also there, carrying machine guns.

The Mexicans we saw really hustled. At their jobs, they never stopped moving. They accosted people outside of restaurants and handed them menus. When our drivers got out to open doors for us and get our luggage, they practically ran.

It was sort of the opposite of the Bahamas, where it’s hard to get people to take your money or do anything. I remember pulling up to a fuel dock in Bimini, in my dad’s boat. We needed about 700 gallons of diesel, so my dad was going to spend a lot of money. There was a light sprinkling of rain. The attendant refused to come out of his enclosure until he was sure it was over. That was not an unusual experience.

Overall, Cancun was a lot like America, except where America deserves B-pluses, Cancun generally deserves C’s. The mall was okay, but not quite up to par. The taxis were okay, but they were tiny, cramped, and old. The rooms we rented were okay, but the hygiene was off, the washers were puzzles, and little things were lacking. We had an oven, but it didn’t work, and there were no oven pans. We had a dishwasher, but there was no dishwashing powder. We had towels but no washcloths. We had split AC units, but big chunks of ice fell out of one of them.

My wife said Mexico was like an America that had gone to a bad public school.

The clinics themselves didn’t look great. We only went inside one, but we saw the others from outside, and they looked worse. The cabinets and furniture looked like they were 20 years old. Some of the equipment didn’t look all that new. Still, the personnel made great impressions on us, and nothing looked like it would cause problems. And they had all that tech stuff American dentists don’t have. They put the money where it mattered.

Would I go back for dental or medical care? Most assuredly. I wouldn’t let them give me a heart transplant, but I would let them do dermatology or a root canal. Most medical and dental work is simple and routine, and it’s not like American doctors and dentists have made a great impression on me. Also, based on my own experiences, I believe foreign doctors are much less likely to overtreat. An American urologist once told me to get a $5000 CAT scan for a simple kidney stone that only needed oxycodone and lots of water, and he never told me about potassium citrate, which prevents kidney stones.

Would I go to Cancun as a tourist? Only if I had some reason to hide away for a while in a fairly cheap place where I would not be disturbed. Even then, the Bahamas would be better.

I wouldn’t go to Cancun for the beaches, the ocean, the food, the culture, or the scenery. Cancun is too seedy, the tourist culture revolves mainly around fornication and throwing up in hotel toilets, and I’m not willing to spend 12 hours on the road, traveling in a run-down minivan, to see a couple of dumpy pyramids where demon-worshipers cut the hearts out of living children. If I want to visit places where children are mutilated and killed, I can go to almost any big American city and visit an abortion mill or a hospital that does gender surgery.

It will take around 6 months for my wife’s bones to be ready for the completion of her implant, so we will be returning to Cancun at least once. We will pay a lot less for our flight because spring break will be in the past. We’ll know where to stay and what to eat. I’ll have my 75 Spanish sentences to get us by. After that, it should be many years before either of us need any more major dental procedures.

Now I have to face my American dentist and tell him we went to Cancun. He’ll probably understand. He’s a very nice guy. If not, we’ll go to the dentist next door.

Business is business, or as I like to say, “Negocios son negocios.“