Reading back over today’s segment:
… made me remember just how nervous I was, originally — just how strange it felt — in 2004, to head off to Costa Rica to spend thousands of dollars to get my teeth fixed. Even though, as I briefly mentioned, I’m no stranger to travel or adventures. At 20, I’d run off to South Africa for a job, knowing only one person there, and I had an amazing time there. I’ve called it the best year of my life, out of many good ones …
But anyway, going to Costa Rica for dental work was also a life-changing experience for me, because, besides getting my smile back, better than ever, I never would have gotten to write Beauty from Afar if I hadn’t gone. I still like the magazine piece I wrote about the trip better than how I handled it in the book but that’s because it was more concentrated, more detailed, more about … well, me.
In the book, Prisma Dental comes up a few times. I sort of deliberately broke up the experience. It comes here, in Chapter 1, just by way of telling readers how I came to be a medical traveler, a dental tourist. There is much more about Prisma and Drs. Rubinstein and Cordero later, in the chapter about Costa Rica.
I was in Costa Rica in June and met a gentleman from Cheshire, Conn., who had read my original article about getting my new smile back in 2004, and had finally, in 2009, decided to do what I had done. I asked him if he felt as though the article had been accurate, had prepared him for his own journal and dental work. He said that it absolutely had. So I felt good about that.
We’re up to page 32 of the book, by the way.
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