Good news and bad news...

...on the firewood front. First, the good news: we finally got some. Delivery had been expected in August, but it was obviously delayed. Now we have to stack it and then Walt will start cutting it. It rained a good part of the day yesterday, so we put the stacking job off until today.

Cinq stères (5 cubic meters), or about 1.4 cords of oak logs, partially covered because of yesterday's rain

Then the bad news: our wood supplier is getting out of the business. This will be his last delivery. He's a man named Jean-Claude who we've known for at least ten years — he used to do yard work for our neighbors. I guess it's retirement time for him too. Now I can start the firewood saga.

Dental woes and joys (part 6, the finale)

With the shortage of dentists in our region, sometimes it feels like the good practitioners have more patients than they can handle, as I said yesterday. That it is the less talented dentists who are still taking new patients would follow. I'm not sure that is true, however.

After the woman on the phone at the dental office in Meusnes said she wouldn't give us appointments, I went to the yellow pages. Well, pagesjaunes.fr, actually. (I recently noticed that the most recent telephone directory we have dates back to 2012. They must have stopped printing them now.) I figured I'd start with the Montrichard area, which is only a 15 minute drive down the river from us. There's a nice open-air market there, and there are two good supermarkets.

I found four dentists over there. I just picked one pretty much at random and called his office. His name is Klotz. Now if you pronounce it in French, it sounds more like "klutz" than like "clots." I couldn't resist a name like that, after buying my car from the Garage Danger in Saint-Aignan and getting my hair cuts from Madame Barbier for years. Walt's dentist in San Francisco was Dr. Hack, and he was a good one.

When we drove over the Montrichard last Friday, this is what we found. It's the building Dr. Klotz has his dental office in:

My first thought was: it's the Addams Family's house. I hope Dr. Klotz is not the dentist who treats Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, and Lurch! That fear was reinforced when we saw the dentist's plaque, on the corner of the house, directing us down the gravel pathway on the right in the photo toward the back of the building. We didn't even get to enter through the front door.

My fears were allayed when we rang the bell and pushed the door open. There was a hallway and reception desk, all painted in a very clean white, and a white tile floor — all kind of sterile. The receptionist/dental assistant was charming, as she had been on the telephone when I called for the appointments. She gave us a form to fill out so that Dr. Klotz would have a record of our visit and know the name of our médecin traitant, what medications we take, and our contact information.

We sat down in the waiting room — just the two of us, since it was 8:30 a.m. — and not 10 minutes went by before I was called in to see the dentist. He was dressed all in white, as was his assistant, who came into the room with me. We chatted for a minute and I told Dr. Klotz, a 50-year-old man with a pleasant demeanor, that I was American, that I spoke French after a fashion (à ma façon), and that I'd spent a lot of my life living in France.

He first took a full set of x-rays and he announced to me that he didn't see any problems. My teeth are healthy and everything is in good condition. He then did the cleaning that I asked for, and he was thorough and careful. He gave me a tiny brush — sort of like a bottle brush — and said it would be better than dental floss when it came to cleaning between my teeth. I was so happy, and so relieved to have found a good dentist, finally, to replace the one in Saint-Aignan who retired two or three years ago.

The whole visit took less than half an hour. I thanked Dr. Klotz and went back to the waiting room to give Walt the thumbs up. He's great, I told Walt. And while he was getting his teeth x-rayed and cleaned, I went to the Netto supermarket down the street and bought a fresh supply of groceries. We were back at home by 10:30, just in time to get our daily bread from the bread lady.

— FIN —

Dental woes and joys (part 5)

I'm happy to say I don't have a phobia about dentists and dentistry, despite the horrifying Marathon Man incident I wrote about yesterday. That story had a happy outcome, as this one will.

In fact, a few years later, when I lived in Washington DC, I had to have, or decided to have, an oral surgery procedure done to correct the problem that had caused my tooth pain and gum swelling in Paris in 1980. I found a very good dental surgeon in DC, just steps from the apartment that Walt and I lived in, and the operation was a success. I've never had a problem with that molar again.

And I didn't end up in the emergency room, as did the woman who cuts my hair these days, after her visit to the dentist in Saint-Aignan. The dentist had drilled so deeply into a tooth that she had damaged the patient's optic nerve, resulting in loss of vision in one eye. It was a temporary condition, and our coiffeuse recovered completely, by the way.

The fact is, however, that as August dawned, I still hadn't found a dentist. I happened to have scheduled an appointment with my médecin traitant (primary care physician) in Saint-Aignan. He examined my injured finger, and I asked him if he could help me find a dentist. He said that three dentists had recently set up a joint practice over in the village of Meusnes. I should call that office.

I had actually called there in July, only to get a recording to say that all the dentists were on vacation for three weeks. Please call back in August, I was told. In mid-August, I was out and about so I drove over to Meunes, just 7 or 8 miles west of Saint-Aignan. Sometimes you have more luck in person than over the phone. (Meusnes a wine village where, I've heard, the famous French tennis player Yannick Noah spent many summers when he was growing up.)

When I got there I drove all around the village until I found the dental office, which is in a modern building on the main road but on the other side of town, on the way to Selles-sur-Cher. There were five or six cars in the parking lot. And there was a big sign on the door saying something like « Les prises de rendez-vous s'effectuent uniquement par téléphone », followed by a phone number. So I had to drive back home and call for a rendez-vous.

Guess what? I got an answering machine again. I left my message, saying I wanted two rendez-vous and gave my name and Walt's. A few minutes later, I got a call back from a woman who said she had been unable to find either of our names in her patient database. I said that was right — we would be first-time patients because our dentist, le docteur Bigot, had recently retired.

She asked me what the purpose of our dental consultation would be. I told her there was nothing really urgent, thinking that would give her some leeway in scheduling the appointments. We could wait a few weeks or even a couple of months. And I told her that we just needed exams and a cleaning for the time being, but would like to be on her patient list.

Je suis désolée, Monsieur, she told me, but we just cannot take on any new patients at this time. And besides, she added, as if it mattered at that point, an initial rendez-vous with one of our dentists never includes a détartrage! It would simply be an informational session, a get-to-know-you meeting, and then we would continue from there. She seemed to be pretty full of herself.

She did, however, share some useful information. There are two or three dentists over in Montrichard, and two or three up in Contres — both of those towns are within 10 or 12 miles of Saint-Aignan — she said. One of them might be able to see you. I thanked her and that was that.

To be continued...

Dental woes and joys (part 4)

To be fair, I have to say that the dentist I wrote about yesterday has a very good reputation. Some English friends who live across the river from us swear by him. They say he will always immediately see a patient who is in an emergency situation, and he does excellent work. You just have to be patient to be his patient.

I mentioned earlier that I had a very bad experience with a dentist in Paris when I was much younger (in 1980 or '81). It's a long, gruesome story, but here are the essentials. I experienced pain and swelling around a tooth that had a crown on it. The gold crown had cost me a fortune 7 or 8 years earlier, at a time when I wasn't rolling in money (I was a grad student in Illinois at the time), and the dentist who did the original work told me there was a slight risk that the tips of the roots of that tooth could one day cause me trouble.

Friends in Paris recommended that I consult their family dentist, who they liked and respected. I made an appointment — it was Christmastime. When I went to the dentist's office near the Pompidou Center, I learned that he had taken time off for the holidays and left his patients in the hands of a young substitute. He was the dentist who saw me.

After listening to my story, he said he was going to pull the tooth with the gold crown on it. I protested. The original dentist had told me that shouldn't be necessary if something did flare up. The substitute dentist then said that it was possible that the pain and swelling was coming from the tooth right in front of the crown. He would work on that one.

He proceeded to drill a hole in the tooth and started to do a root canal (called une dévitalisation in French). He didn't give me any anesthetic before he started drilling and then poking around in the innards of the tooth with a needle of some kind. The pain was excruciating, and again I squawked. (Remember the film Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman and the sadistic dentist?) In my case, the substitute dentist basically called me a sissy and stopped what he was doing.

He said I should go away for a week, which would be time enough for the nerve in that tooth to die. I think he stuffed a little piece of gauze into the hole he had drilled, but he didn't otherwise seal it. He said that when I came back a week later, if I wasn't better, he was going to pull the tooth with the gold crown on it. By the way, the dentist was not a Frenchman. He spoke French, and I don't remember his name, but he wasn't French by birth, and I of course don't know where he was trained.

I spent a miserable week. The gauze fell out of the damaged tooth after 24 hours, and every breath of air I took through my mouth, and every cold or hot liquid I drank caused more excruciating pain. The swelling wasn't going down. I obviously wasn't getting better. Toward the end of that horrible week, I made the decision to take the bus out to the American Hospital in Neuilly, west of Paris, and consult a dentist there.

That dentist was French, I might add. I had gone to the American Hospital once before, a few years earlier, to see a dentist, so I knew it was a possible solution. The dentist there examined me, and was shocked to see what condition I had been left in. He gave me a shot of novocaine, finished the root canal, patched up the tooth, and then prescribed antibiotics.

He also said he didn't want to slander a colleague, but that I had been the victim of unethical practices. The substitute dentist had "devitalized" (killed) a perfectly health tooth, and for no good reason. The antibiotics he prescribed would cure the infection that had started the whole episode. And they did. In a few days, I was back to normal.

I went back for the appointment with the substitute dentist and told him I had consulted another dentist, who had repaired the botched job he had inflicted upon me. The substitute threw a fit, almost a tantrum, and told me I had no right to see another dentist when I was in the middle his course of treatment! He said it was the dentist who saved me who had behaved unethically. It was surreal.

To be continued...