Like most people, I do not have good memories of my dentist. I’m sure Dr. Brown was quite the nice man, but I remember him as a nightmare, a bogeyman, a sadist, sticking gas masks on me and using one of those medieval bone-rattling drills to torture and frighten me. His needles always seemed a foot long to me, and I don’t recall him asking if it hurt. It always hurt, and I didn’t sleep for days in advance of my appointments. For years, even the mention of dentistry gave me the sweats. But life is a circle, a wheel that turns. My dentist is located in the small and struggling town of Granville, New York, right by the Vermont border. The Granville Family Dentistry continually surprises me.
“I see you are no stranger to dentistry,” was the first thing Dr. Harvey Coco ever said to me.” His assistant Dawn Delisle laughed. Dr. Coco loves irony, you can see it in his eyes. He does not take himself, the world too seriously, except when he is drilling or poking around Then, he is very quiet.
I think of Granville Family Dentistry as a place that could only exist in the country, and nothing about the town Granville is especially modern. A once booming Slate mining area, Granville is one of those beautiful upstate New York towns that the world has left behind. Yet the dental facility is a spotless and strikingly modern facility which reflects the ethos of nearby Vermont – it runs on solar power, there are giant panels outside and the computerized x-ray and records system is right out of Star Wars.
It is a high-tech place, yet not. Here, technology has not overwhelmed humanity. It has none of the impersonal coldness of medical facilities, it could well be set in the 1950’s. The staff seems cheerful and engaged – everyone who works there gets to pick the music for morning and afternoon rotations. It is clean and manages to be as close to painless as dentistry can get. I am spending some considerable time there lately – decaying cavities, a crown, and now, a root canal scheduled for Monday. Dr. Brown continues to haunt me across age and time.
The oddest thing is that I look forward to going (mostly), and generally have a great time when I get there. Dr. Coco and Dawn and I make a lot of noise. We trade stories, laugh, compare notes on the absurdities of life, and I appreciate the small things that add up to big things.
The whole place exudes competence, but I am especially lucky to be in the care of Dr. Coco and Dawn. These two exude the values of another time. They have been working together for years, and I am always touched by how Dr. Coco sees Dawn as a partner, the two of them working in sync, with respect and affection. Doctors have a reputation for arrogance, Dr. Coco is anything but. He sets a gone that is comfortable and reassuring and Dawn contributes, observes and truly assists.
Generally, Dr. Coco and Dawn don’t even need to speak with one another, each is always ahead of the other. That adds to the comfort level, the confidence and chemistry of these two. Both are rabid football fans (I am not) and once provoked, there is a blizzard of statistics, predictions, arguments, analysis, recaps and gossip. I don’t know exactly what they do, but even root canals hardly hurt, and I am shocked to leave smiling. Like most sports fans, they are both usually outraged about one thing or another – they are both rabid New England Patriots Fans – and I love hearing the recaps, even if I generally don’t know what they are talking about. When you are strapped into a dentist’s chair, it doesn’t really matter, you don’t have to try and grunt and mumble an opinion.
Dr. Coco and Dawn have a great sense of humor, and they inspire me to get some of my own stories out there, once there is a break in the NFL chatter (they both know a LOT about football). Sometimes the laughter in our room is so l loud the office staff says you can hear it all the way down the hall. Sometimes, I give as good as I get, I love to tell stories too but rarely in a doctor’s office. Dr. Coco tells funny stories of parenting, Dawn has resisted computers and social media. They love working together, an odd but compatible couple.
I called Maria up this morning and said “I need a root canal, but it will be fine. I love going to the dentist, isn’t that strange?” Even she has no idea how strange it is for me. Health care is complex for everyone in our world, and for most people, it is a tense and unnerving process, forbidding and uncomfortable. One day in Granville I was sitting in the waiting room and another patient and I were aghast at the explicit gum disease video running on the tube. We each mentioned it – who wants to wait to see the dentist watching that? – and it was gone the next day.
Dr. Coco and Dawn Delisle are a fine medical team, but what is important about them – and perhaps this is a rural life thing – is that they remember to be human, and that their patients are human. In this way, they have spanned the sometimes yawning chasm between humanity and good health care.
They are taking good care of my big mouth, but they are also making the bogeyman go away. I thought he would be with me to the end.