Algodones, Zircon, Asparagus

Last month, Ron and I traveled to Algodones in Mexico for low-budget dental care because it costs far less to fly to Mexico to have any number of procedures (all expenses considered) than to do it in the U.S. with no insurance. We found out about the Sani Clinic in Algodones from several friends who have gone there for dental work. Algodones is just over the border from Yuma, Arizona. It’s a small town filled with little other than dental clinics, other health providers, pharmacies, and street vendors aggressively accosting American visitors and convincing them to buy all manner of frivolous tchotchkes while they’re high on Novocain and don’t have the best judgement.

I want to say up front that the Sani Clinic is terrific. The staff is knowledgeable, professional, helpful, kind, and extremely good at what they do. If you think that the U.S. provides the best medical and dental care in the world, think again. Not only can you access high-quality care from excellent healthcare providers in countries all over the world, but you can get it at a much more reasonable cost than jacked-up American prices. We went for Ron to get extensive work done that we could not afford in the States. While we were there, I took advantage of their services and got a crown for a cracked molar that my American dentist had urged me to get fixed. Worried about having a reaction (my body is woefully sensitive) to a foreign material embedded in my mouth, I had been reluctant to get a crown. If I got a platinum crown, would my immune system break down? Would I develop a mysterious rash? Crave food cooked in foil? Go cross-eyed? (No, wait, that already happened without a crown.) The dentist at the Sani suggested I get a zirconia crown since people with sensitivities rarely react to zircon. Zircon crowns are the most expensive kind, costing between $1500 and $2500 in the U.S. At the Sani the cost was $450. So I now own a zircon tooth. I wonder if my zircon tooth will give me superpowers. Invisibility? Teleporting? Understanding the language of whales? Figuring out what on Earth goes on in my husband’s head?

Our daughter went with us to help me out just in case something took a turn for the worse at the clinic with Ron, which it didn’t. She was a good sport about being stranded in a town with no decent restaurants, no night life, populated only with aging American dental patients and sales-crazed Mexican vendors who grabbed people off the street and shoved jewelry, pottery, woven clothing, and metal sculptures of burros wearing sombreros in their face. Fortunately, Ron’s oral surgery went extremely well. Here in the USSSSA the dentist would probably have turned the work into a full-day affair complete with no eating ahead of time, anesthesia, complex efforts to keep his blood sugar stable, and on and on. At the Sani, they shot him up with Novocain and had him out of there in 90 minutes. The cost of doing everything Ron wanted to do would have been out of reach for us at home. In Mexico, it was about one-third as expensive and thus doable.

While I loved the Sani Clinic, I did not love the travel, hotel, food, or town. One can’t expect much from the cuisine in a town filled with foreigners unable to chew, I suppose. With my delicate digestion, it came as no surprise to me that I got sick from the food by my second day out. After spending hours tormented by stomach cramps, I no longer had any desire to try local cuisine. Fortunately, I brought a fair amount of food from home in my suitcase since I travel like a refugee (wandering-Jew historical trauma syndrome). I brought a lot of hummus (what wandering Jew can travel without it?), gluten-free crackers, and fruit. At least I seemed capable of digesting scrambled eggs for breakfast at the restaurant on the corner. While out and about fending off the vendors in order to admire their beautiful wares, I came upon a man on a street corner selling fresh asparagus. I bought two big bunches, to my daughter’s horror. She was convinced I would get salmonella. I washed the asparagus in my hotel room and ate it raw with hummus and it was delicious. Meanwhile, my daughter furiously texted her brothers and tried to enlist them to beg me to throw out the asparagus. Perhaps my super power is that I can eat any asparagus. One of Ron’s greatest disappointments of the trip was that while the menu at our corner restaurant teased him by listing horchata, whenever he ordered it they said they didn’t have it. It was kind of like being trapped in the Monty Python cheese shop sketch, only without the fun of John Cleese asserting there was no horchata (but it was on the menu!) in a hilariously bad Spanish accent.

The travel to and from Algodones was no fun. We flew on American Airlines (AA), which required us to change planes in Phoenix. On the way to Yuma, AA managed to tear a seam on my suitcase, but not to the point that it was unusable for the return trip. My daughter’s suitcase arrived in Yuma, however, appearing as if it had gone through the Civil War. All the zipper tabs were missing and it looked like someone had set it on fire. (She was later issued a generous check to replace her suitcase. AA in San Francisco sent my suitcase out to repair and returned it to me at my house within ten days.) AA delayed my daughter’s flight out of L.A. so that she missed her connection in Phoenix and arrived in Yuma so late that customs at the border had closed so she had to stay in a hotel by the airport and join us the next day. AA did the same thing to us on the way home – delayed the flight from Yuma so we missed our connection in Phoenix. We spent so much time in the Phoenix airport that I was able to find a gluten-free chocolate cookie (maybe my zircon super power is being able to find gluten-free chocolate cookies in airports), fell asleep, and nearly finished the 1400-page novel I was reading. When AA finally managed to get us on a flight back to California, they couldn’t get us to Oakland (where we flew out) but instead inconveniently sent us to San Francisco and we had to take a Lyft back to Oakland. Lucky for us, we have a friend who is a Lyft driver and we managed to find him and hire him to take us back across the Bay. He and Ron enjoyed a good catch-up chat in the front seat.

While the people at our hotel next door to the clinic were helpful and friendly, the accommodations were bare-bones and I found them uncomfortable. I shouldn’t complain because we did not pay for the hotel (if you spend more than $2000 at the Sani, they pay for your hotel room). We had a bed, a bathroom, and a mini-fridge. No way to boil water, though, so even though I brought coffee and equipment to brew it, we had no hot water. Ron suffered more from the lack of decent coffee than anything else during our dental escapade, because it turned out that no one in Algodones knew how to brew a decent cup of coffee. The pillows were the most uncomfortable pillows I have ever encountered. They were plastic. What else could one expect from a hotel that caters to people who drool blood all night after dental extractions? I always travel with my own pillow, but even though I had my pillow as a buffer, those giant Chiclets that the hotel tried to pass off as pillows destroyed my neck. The woman at the front desk was a sweetheart and I enjoyed chatting with her about our grandchildren (she has eleven!) when I passed through the lobby. On our last day in Algodones, she told us we could stay in our room after checkout time since we planned to catch a late shuttle to Yuma. But then her super-mean boss turned up and had a fit that we were still in our room and demanded that we clear out. Puffing out his chest like a rooster, he informed us that our friend at the front desk didn’t own the hotel, and he did, and he wanted us to leave by checkout time. Bad things happen when you try to get my husband to hurry up. He has only one speed and it’s slow. The more you rush him, the slower he gets. In his haste, he left all his pants in the dresser at the hotel. Fortunately he remembered to put a pair on before we left. Later he called the lovely woman at the front desk and she said she would set aside his pants for him until he goes back in July to finish his dental work. In the meantime, he has an excuse to buy new pants, which he has to do anyway since he has lost so much weight while recovering from oral surgery.

I brought my travel blender, nutrition powder, and yogurt to Mexico; and we bought fruit and juice from the restaurant on the corner. So I kept Ron fed. I would say my zircon super power is keeping people fed, but I had that one before I went to Mexico. I think the highpoint of Ron’s trip was clobbering me and my daughter at Scrabble (repeatedly). The only game I perhaps would have won came to an abrupt demise when I got my foot tangled trying to stand up and knocked the board over onto the floor. That game was not salvageable. Ron went on to win the subsequent game with some word worth like about 1400 points. Scrabble prowess is obviously not the zircon super power (unless the tooth is transmitting the super power to Ron).

We spent our last night in a hotel next to the Yuma Airport because I couldn’t handle one more night with the plastic pillows and because our flight was at a deeply uncivilized early hour. Our flight was delayed, so we could have slept in instead of racing to the airport to wait. But then I would never have found the gluten-free chocolate cookie when we missed our connection in Phoenix. When we checked out of the hotel in Yuma, I asked the clerk at the front desk for a receipt. He printed a receipt, showed it to me, and said he couldn’t give me a copy because he claimed I had paid for the room on Expedia and they don’t allow the hotel to share a copy of the receipt. Wait, what? In fact, I hadn’t booked the room on Expedia. As someone who makes my own rules, I picked the receipt up off the counter and said to the clerk, “I’ll just steal this receipt.” He blanched and clutched his chest. Fearing he might have a heart attack, I relinquished the receipt. I was not prepared to cause the death of a hotel clerk before I had my morning coffee. Ironically, when we got home, my daughter emailed me a copy of the receipt. She said that when she checked out later that morning, the clerk told her there was a mix-up with the receipt and it was OK for me to have a copy. With people dying every day because they can’t afford healthcare and don’t realize they might be able to afford it in Mexico (or Canada or France or Germany), democracy in America fading in the rearview, and our sweet Earth perishing before our very eyes, I don’t really care about a ridiculous hotel receipt.

Upon our return, a friend of mine told me she admires me for going to Mexico for the dental care. She said that most people who found out about that option simply wouldn’t follow up on it. Maybe so. It’s a good reminder to act on what we know, to step back from problems (don’t be daunted) and look for creative solutions, and to make efforts to broaden our thinking because we put ourselves in boxes that restrain us. Do not be so quick to dismiss magical thinking because you never know where it will take you. If you wander around an airport long enough you might just find the perfect gluten-free chocolate cookie.