Patch Blog: Samurai Dentist?

Samurai Dentist?

So as I was warming up on a chilly Saturday courtesy of my heated Bavarian chariot seat on the drive home from my weekly hair trimming/temporal hair coloring, it occurred to me maybe I wasn’t the hard-nosed dental warrior I used to be.

In fact, looking into the mirror (no magnification or LED light please), who I was seeing but really didn’t wanna see had somehow become something of a delicate little flower. But it wasn’t always this way.

Before I went to the private school for my dental education I was just as normal as some of you readers out there pretend to be. I never wore a tie, didn’t wear anything from Italy, and couldn’t have distinguished avocado body lotion from Crest toothpaste.

My earliest glimpse into the future came just after I’d snagged my first job out of dental school. A classmate, who coulda been Doc Eddie Haskell but went by the alias Doctor Dan Toby, landed us career positions in a Hawthorne pediatric dental clinic. The joint was supposed to look like a castle and it did…on the outside. Inside, it was anything but this man’s home.

A few months earlier, I’d been providing USC Trojan dental care for one patient in the morning and another in the afternoon. On Day One inside the castle, I was looking at a line-up of about 80 kids, any 4-5 of which could see one another being incorrigible through glass partitions.

By Day Two, I’d almost finished the patients from Day One…and I knew I wasn’t gonna specialize in pediatrics. And here I went to dental school because I thought a day at the office was gonna be just like another day at the beach…

On Day Three, I met the dentist for whom we were subbing. He was supposed to be 42 but he looked more like 70. And that’s when I knew if I was gonna stay in the game until Michael Bolton finally stopped scaring the patients over the Bose speakers I was obliged to take good care of myself.

So today I have an entire support staff committed to keeping me functional and in fair working order except for when I’m on a golf course. But I do have my own golf “swing” coach. My own golf psychologist or hypnotherapist would probably be more helpful, but those guys seem to shy away from taking on new molar jockey clients. A coincidence?

I do have two chiropractors, an MD, a practice advisor, three mentors, a study group, three spin instructors, a yoga teacher, a stylist, and a massage therapist. I love ‘em all but if my melon was even bigger than for real and I was Tom Hanks stranded on an island with a soccer ball and person to beam in, it would be Gina, Renaissance woman for all seasons and massage therapist to the stars.

If the classic dental posture could assume any identity, the choice would be a toss-up between an upside-down lawn chair and a question mark. A past chiropractor once described my back as a slab of stringy beef jerky and that’s definitely no way to speak to a delicate little molar jockey flower.

Instead, the star of my support team is so much more than the Mother of all massage therapists; she’s also a survivor of retail (a discipline largely unknown in most parts of Temple City), a writer, an artist, gourmet chef, and a student of literature. Uh, did I mention she’s Sicilian (I’m a half-breed) and beautiful?

Gina authored a book called The Philosopher’s Spoon, a cookbook and journal designed to help reveal the transformative power of gratitude; she updates her blog at www.philosophersspoon.com weekly and she was a finalist in the 2002 Pillsbury Bake-Off just for the fun of it for cryin’ out loud. And yeah, I’m serious.

Don’t know about you guys, but if I lost my diode laser, my Angels’ Rally Monkey from Game Six of the World Series or ticked-off Gina (Sicilians have long memories, don’t forgive and are totally bent on revenge — but maybe that’s just my family?) I’d be more depressed than former VP Cheney handcuffed to a chair in a roomful of Big Macs.

Last week, Gina even gave me the cure for insomnia (following close Clipper losses at Staples and the cure wasn’t even soccer) by sending me over to Whole Foods for the organic antidote.

So I may not be the dental Samurai I never was but I wouldn’t still be the fastest stationary cyclist to never leave a room and I wouldn’t be typing totally pain-free without my fav support team member in the world.

Grazie bella Gina.