Although disappointed for not having been discharged from Occupational Therapy only three months after my surgery, the OT, noticing the necessity of further development of the fine motor skills of my hand, has recommended, wait for it….knitting. He noticed my Summer Flies scarf and asked if I was a knitter. Yes, as a matter of fact, I AM a knitter, and although I've not been prolific in recent times, I do have ten years worth of blog posts to prove it.

This Spring in Vancouver has been spectacular. Sorry, Easterners, here in the Pac NW, Spring has sprung a month or more ahead of schedule. The early rhododendrons were blooming at the end of January. This being my birthday weekend, quince is the only shrub that's normally in bloom north of the 49th parallel. On my lunchtime walk this week I counted 22 different flowers and blossoms. 

Vancouver's cherry blossoms were the subject of this week's watercolour class:

An accurate description of our lives right now: the final moments before a significant event and the procedures carried out during this time.

In chronological order:

1. May: The big R's, retirement for both of us. This was a big and scary decision, but it feels very good. Fretting for years regarding a retirement without a pension I came to the conclusion we are not going to starve and will make do with what we have. Plus we've saved for some exciting travels in the first years.

2. August: A grand announcement – Elina and Sean are expecting baby #2, a sibling for three year old grandson, Rye.

3. September: The culmination of years of dreaming, planning and training – our trek on the Camino de Santiago. We're going to give it an honest try anyway. Unable to carry a traditional backpack due to a previous neck injury, we found these Aarn body packs, designed to distribute the weight all around your waist, no pressure on the shoulders at all. The two front pouches are dubbed "the Pamelas," by guys no doubt.

So much to look forward to.

The knitting has been non-existent with the recent surgery, however I managed  160 stitches of crochet. Aaaaaahhhhhh, colour and texture are back in my life. The painting, however, has satisfied the colour aspect, a semblance of texture, as well as the need for creativity.  The latest is a Himalayan Blue Poppy:

Odd as it seems, I have amassed a collection of signs taken in washrooms (as we say in Canada).

The first one was a ladies' room mission statement taken at Busch Gardens in Florida:

 Their mission didn't include excellent punctuation.

This one is posted at my favourite Thai restaurant in Bellingham, WA. 

It reminds me of the graffiti that was written on the wall of the bathroom of the August Moon Chinese restaurant in my hometown. In 8th grade, after attending our Saturday girls bowling league, a group of us, presumably an even number, would split the lunch special. I'm dating myself when I tell you that it cost $1.15 for one appetizer, an entree with rice, and a dessert. Two of us split the entree, one person having the appetizer and the other dessert. The writing on the wall of the bathroom was "flush twice, it's a long way to the kitchen. 

Next up is one I saw in Quebec at Montmorency Falls:

After hand surgery, during my weekly visit to the occupational therapy department of St. Paul's hospital here in Vancouver, I found this gentle reminder in the unisex restroom. Excuse the blurriness; it was a laminated piece of photocopy paper that doesn't photograph well:

Blogless Marsha, living in a house with men, explained to me that in mens' rooms, you don't have to flush the urinals. They should have added remembering to put the seat down.

In the spirit of a picture is worth a thousand words, this ladies' room sign appeared on Royal Caribbean's ship, the Legend of the Seas:

Finally, Valentine's Day night required an emergency visit to Walmart to purchase denture adhesive to reseat a crown that popped off while biting into a pink raspberry gummy heart. I'll spare you the picture. Funny thing is that my son tried one first, and as soon as he bit into it said, no way, he didn't want to risk his recent dental work by pulling off a crown. I should have listened to him.

Their washroom aims for clean and adequate, stated on a sign far from the latter. I don't know about you, but I like a bathroom mission statement that exceeds the goal of adequacy. 

I thought these two recent paintings were appropriate for Valentine's Day.

Puppy Love, my grandson and his little girlfriend:

 

Wedding flowers, a sentimental gift:

 

This painting reminds me of the student’s name in the Kung Fu Movie. I signed up for three watercolour workshops with an accomplished Palm Springs area artist, Diane Morgan, who doesn’t announce the subject matter until you arrive at the class. An interesting strategy, because if I had known we were painting grasshoppers, I would never have signed up. Turns out, it’s my favourite of the three. The other two can be seen in the two previous posts.

 

It also reminds me of the Mary Oliver poem, The Summer Day, with the very memorable last two lines:

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

 

Do:

– go to Algodones for dental work, but make sure you know the name of the dentist that will actually do the work. Check out his/her credentials in advance. My daughter saw a dentist in Cancun, claiming to have attended the University of Michigan and having an affiliation with the ADA. A check online proved both claims to be true and her work was successful.  

– expect pushback from those who think that dental/medical care in another country is an unaccceptible concept. One woman I talked to told me of a friend whose US dentist refused to talk to her again after discovering she had been to Algodones for work. B's work was checked afterwards by an American dentist: the cleaning and four of the crowns were fine. One wasn't acceptible and one required just two seconds of further adjusting. Dental tourism definitely leads to interesting discussions.

Don't worry, those are temporaries, and one has a hole with a story behind it. 

– be aware of the time zones. Los Algodones is on Pacific time, the dentists operate on Arizona time, an hour later, as most of their patients are snowbirds residing in AZ. Here's the complicated part. Most people park on the US side, in a lot owned by the nearby casino located in California, and walk over the border (as rental cars don't come with Mexican insurance),  but is on AZ time. So the lesson learned, is that if you park in the overnight lot, and you are told to move your car by 9:00am, they mean 8:00 am, otherwise you are leaving parking lot at 10:00am and will be expected to pay for another day.  My experience ended with an altercation with a not so understanding sheriff from the reservation. Are you confused? So were we. You've been warned. 

– pay attention to pricing for optometry. I require special lenses a version of which were available, but took 11 days to process, with prices comparable to those in Canada. I elected to shop for frames instead, intending to buy the lenses at home. Upon checking online, the frames were less expensive via mail order.

– eat tacos at Molcas', where "if you don't like the food you don't pay." We were there on multiple occasions and ate beef, goat, pork, fish, shrimp and chicken tacos. Two tacos each, one margarita for the boy and a Diet Coke for me – $12. 

– stay in Yuma or the Hacienda in Algodones. We did both: two nights at the Best Western in Yuma, very reasonable and included breakfast and two beers or glasses of wine at happy hour each night and three at the Hacienda – clean and comfortable and lots of people with whom to commiserate, all sailing in the same dental boat.

– plan on time off from the dentist, difficult when it is impossible to know how long you will be at the clinic. We went to the Yuma Regional Center for a  10:45am movie matinee, at a cushy theater$5/seniors and $6.50 for adults. 

Painting is my stress relief these days. Thank goodness my surgery was on my left hand:

 Don't:

– go to a large clinic that can't tell you who your specific dentist will be. The clinic we attended employed 30 dentists. The clinic's marketing advertised all the right credentials, but your chances of beign assigned to one of the practitioners advertised are not guaranteed.

 - schedule an appointment during the December/January holidays. We ended up driving down and back twice as, although we were told coming on December 22nd would allow sufficient time for work and lab time, it didn't work out that way. Also the dentists working in Algodones, may actually live 10-15 hours away, and understandably want to be with their families during the holidays, leaving a skeleton staff and a packed clinic. 

– expect to be seen on time. Plan to wait for many hours at the clinic for each phase of treatment. That was the number one complaint of most people I talked to. 

– be surprised when they suggest you need a pile of crowns. If your tooth requires a multi surface filling it seems a crown is recommended. We met many seniors who were having every tooth crowned, and a fifteen year old who required fifteen crowns. We were shocked when we were told B needed eight. We agreed to six based on the evidence shown through x-ray and examination. The other two were repaired conventionally by a dentist in California.

– buy controlled prescription drugs (which includes some antibiotics) unless you have a prescription for them. Always buy from one of the major pharmacies. 

 

 

Reasonably priced dental care, prescription drugs and optometry services lure uninsured and senior Canadian and US travellers to this "quaint" Mexican border town where there are 300 dental clinics in about six square blocks. There are more dentists here per capita than anywhere else in the world. The town is so geared to dental patients, that the restaurants offer blended meals on request.

I totally get it when you consider how many people are uninsured dentally and are looking at $1300 for a crown in Canada, where in Algodones, the price ranges from $180 (porcelain on metal) to $375 (Cerec, a crown-in-a-day system or Zirconia crowns) each. Last year the Calgary Sun ran this article about dental tourism.

Our 24 year old son, insuranceless, was in need of major work. We did not quite enough research and plunged into a dental adventure. Algodones was a 2.5 hour drive from where we were staying in Palm Springs. I'll give you the ending first and the next post will be the do's and don'ts.

B had a total of six crowns, fewer than they wanted to do, but the x-rays supported the treatment plan for those six specific teeth. His discomfort afterwards required a visit to a dentist in Palm Springs and we were somewhat reassured that four of the six were done acceptably. One, however, will need to be replaced and can best be considered as a temporary requiring extra effort to be kept clean. The other required two seconds of adjusting for a more comfortable fit.

All in all, including the cost of the dentist in Palm Springs, who adjusted his bite to make him finally comfortable, and who did the restorative work on the two teeth that would have been crowned in Mexico, we got what we paid for, $7000 of Canadian dental work for $2000.

I would not recommend the clinic we used, one of the largest in Algodones, but they did their best for us after we requested a change in dentist and they discovered a mistake, including putting us up in their affiliated hotel, the only one in town, for three nights over New Year's. I would be glad to share more specifics, just leave a comment and I'll reply. It bears mention that I met many people in the waiting room over our eight days of dental treatment, who were repeat customers, and were happy with their work.

Our room in the Hacienda:

Making the best of a challenging situation, AKA killing the pain x 2, teeth and hand:

 Completed vacation painting, thought the subject of olives and salsa was appropriate:

 Los Algodones feels like a dental twilight zone. The litter in the street includes occasional discarded dental cotton rolls, floss and and some dropped anti-inflammatories. It feels very safe considering that thousands of people are walking around with cash in their pocket for major dental treatment. I would go again heeding the do's and don'ts in my next post.