I went to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned this week. Part of moving is establishing new relationships with health care providers. We are discovering that there are challenges to this process. It has been made a bit more complex by the fact that on the first of the year, our church changed from a medicare supplement for retired clergy to a medicare PPO. Changing insurance companies involves more than simply receiving new insurance cards. We’ve received volumes and volumes of paperwork from the insurance provider, waded through pages and pages of information about deductibles, co-pays, network and out of network providers, and a lot of other details. It has been a challenge for us, but we are reluctant to complain because we have enjoyed excellent health insurance during our careers as pastors. We are well aware that health care in the United States is a luxury market, with many people priced out of upper-tier care and we have been given access to the luxury end of that market through an extensive health care package. Many people have no dental insurance. We do.

The new dentist I found has a brand-new building with all kinds of state of the art equipment. In addition to the computers that are used by the technicians and assistants and dentists, there is a monitor beside the dental chair so that the patient can see their own x-rays. In addition, when the chair is tipped back, there is a monitor on the ceiling for the patient to look at. I’ve never known quite what to look at while having my teeth cleaned. Staring into the face of the hygienist seems a bit rude. Looking at the bright light doesn’t seem like a good idea. The ceiling tiles in most professional buildings don’t carry much interest. Sometimes I close my eyes. When I was working, I had to be careful not to fall asleep reclined and silenced. Usually the technician would find some place to put a sharp instrument that prevented total relaxation.

In this new dentist’s office, however, the pictures they were showing on the monitor above my head were new to me. I’m sure they are designed to distract and calm the patient. What I saw was a series of short videos. Some were underwater images with lots of fish and underwater plants. There were some of beautiful natural scenery, some taken with drones, I suspect. Several were arial shots of cities. I could identify some of the cities by iconic buildings and objects: London, New York, Dubai, Hong Kong. The city shots were just a bit disorienting for me. I’m looking straight up, but the images are looking down from above. I suspect that some patients experience a bit of vertigo from watching videos from that perspective.

Making the process more interesting from my point of view is that the hygienist replaced my glasses with a pair of plastic sunglasses with blue lenses. Not having my own glasses meant that the images on the screen above my head were slightly blurred. I can see pretty well at that distance, but it isn’t quite perfectly focused. More disorienting was that the blue lenses filtered the colors so that they weren’t quite right. This wasn’t a problem with urban scenes, as I don’t know all of the colors of buildings anyway. The water around cities, however, wasn’t a natural color. The underwater scenes didn’t bother me as I don’t know the fish by color anyway. Some of the nature videos were a bit more distracting with the altered colors.

For part of the procedure, I was distracted by thinking about how the monitor was attached to the ceiling. I mounted a video monitor in a classroom when I was working, so I know how that mount works. It is very secure. The monitor itself has nuts set into its back that are rated for the size and weight of the monitor. The bracket that holds it is adjustable for angle to give a good view. I doubt that I needed to think of the monitor falling off of the ceiling, but the thought occurred to me nonetheless. I once had the experience of an auto technician forgetting to use a torque wrench to make sure the lug nuts were secure after rotating my tires. The result was a potentially dangerous situation. Fortunately I discovered it before the wheel and tire fell off of the vehicle, but losing a front tire at highway speeds wouldn’t have been fun. So I hope that the technician who installed the video monitor tightened the bolts the correct amount. I’m not sure that video installers know about torque wrenches. I’m pretty sure they just tighten the bolts by feel.

The procedure was completed without incident. Nothing fell off of the ceiling. My teeth are cleaned. The experience does, however, raise a question in my mind about the whole business of luxury health care. I know video monitors are relatively inexpensive, but they are not free. All of those monitors add to the cost of providing dental care. So do the advanced imaging tools. Most of the people in the world don’t receive any dental care except when pain forces them to seek care. They don’t get their teeth cleaned professionally twice each year. They don’t have x-rays to detect hidden cavities or small areas of infection. They wait until a tooth is broken or an abscess causes severe pain. And when that pain is addressed, often the result is the loss of a tooth. Dental implants and crowns are expensive luxuries well beyond the means of the majority of the world’s population. I’ve experienced toothache enough in this life to know that whether or not there is a television monitor on the ceiling isn’t the biggest priority when emergency care is needed. I wish there was a way to opt for a lower level of luxury in my care so that there could be more care for those who go without. I don’t know, however, how to change the system. Instead, I guess I’ll keep trying to figure out which cities are being shown on the video monitor and guess what color those fish really are.