A Visit To The Oral Surgeon

I was advised  by dentist that I had to have one of my molars removed, and so went to the oral surgeon yesterday to have it pulled.  It was a big operation, with a number of dentists, auxiliary staff, and many offices.  I took the photograph on the left of the view out of the consulting room (Yes! They have a consulting room!) as I waited to be informed of the possible consequences of having a tooth removed (dry socket, non-stop bleeding, a hole in the sinus passage, death, etc.).  Sitting there, I thought about my father Nelson, who was also a dentist.  He started his practice during the Great Depression and opened an office, but had few patients, since nobody had any money.  He moved his practice to his parent's house at 88th and Racine, in the South Side Brainerd neighborhood of Chicago.  The enclosed front porch became his waiting room, and a front bedroom with a door onto the porch became his office.  He never had any assistants, and never sent a patient to an oral surgeon to have a tooth pulled.  He did it all on his own.  How times have changed. Eventually, after many years, he moved his office to a more commercial location in Alsip, Illinois and started making more money.  He hated dentistry, and so decided to see less patients and work fewer hours for the same amount of money until he could happily retire to Stuart, Florida.

But I digress.  The view from the consulting room, with the mountains in the distance, was impressive, but when you looked down, you saw what used to be Fero's Bar and Grill, where five people were systematically stabbed to death here in Denver a few years ago. From the sacred to the profane in one view.  Bill Bryson was in Colorado when these murders occurred, and wrote about it in his new book The Road to Little Dribbling, discussing how in the U.K. this story would have been in the papers for weeks, while here in the U.S. it faded away within days - another example of how Americans have become inured to violence.  In any case, seeing that location (on the far left in the row of shops in the photograph on the right) certainly puts the pain of a tooth extraction in perspective.