Last week I went to the dentist because one of my caps had a run in with a toffee candy and the cap lost. He said the tooth broke off in the cap and I would need a pin, but first, a root canal. We agreed to have it done today. I took my wife with me this time because I felt an accurate translation was needed, just in case. That started out well but it didn’t turn out quite the way I expected it to.
He put in the freezing and after a few minutes, started to drill away. In my previous life, my dentist would yap away with his assistant and with other employees as they came and went out of the room. Sometimes, he would decide to talk to me and I would do the ‘hmmmmm’ and ‘ummmmm’ thing… sometimes interjecting with hand movements. This was a whole different ball game.
A few minutes into the drilling, he started talking to my wife and from that point, pretty much ignored me for the next 30-40 minutes. I was quite aware of the fact he was working on me cognitively. I thought of two things. He’s so dammed good and he’s done this so many times, he can do it by feel or he’s going to realize at some point, that he’s drilling the wrong tooth. Turned out it was the former, but that was something I wont forget for a long time.
What was he talking about? He was talking about the new property taxes. I really tried hard to understand what he was saying, but it was fast. He was pretty worked up and there was no way I could keep up. I figured I was lucky if I picked up half the nouns and strung together enough questions to ask my wife to fill in the blanks later on when the rubber mouth wore off.
Turns out he was talking about his house–the place we were at. He has an office in the front of the house that he uses for Montevideo patients. In the city, most of his time is spent teaching at the university but he has a small, old office in the house for his ‘favourite’ city patients. He was saying that he bought the house many years ago for USD$20K. He has to put about USD$30K into it to fix it up if he wanted to sell it. It would sell for around USD$140K. He would have to pay tax on USD$120K, the difference between what he paid for it and what he could sell it for. He said they dont let you deduct money you spend on improving the property. It’s black and white. Selling price minus purchase price. He told his wife they’re going to have live there until they die because there’s no way he can afford to sell it now.
