Why we are here (in Buenos Aires)

I was born with a defect. More than one I suppose, but the one I am referring to here is a herniated aortic sphincter. In english that means that the top muscle ring of my stomach did not close properly. When a person eats, their stomach muscles contract and flex to slosh around digestive acids with their meal. For me, this would cause anything I put into my stomach to come back up again along with a tasty scoop of bile. Sounds sexy? It gets better. This would cause all kinds of problems like bad breath, heart burn and most importantly for me, tooth decay.

In February of '07 I had surgery to correct the stomach problem ( an edoscopic fundoplasty for those of you that care about these things). Now that the problem was fixed I wanted to move on to correcting my dental problem. Since I needed to have most if not all of my teeth removed I wanted to get implants (not those kind) as a replacement. The problem was that implants are incredibly expensive. The quotes I was getting for the work I wanted were in the 55-60 thousand dollar range. I would go to some place like the Alberta Implant Centre, which is a huge glass building on Calgary trail (in Edmonton), and sit in the leather chairs watching the 52" LCD screen while waiting for my appointment and think that there was a chance I was going to be over charged. My lovely wife read an article in the paper one day talking about a guy who went to Argentina to get dental work done. I got on the Al Gore and did some research and found out that there was a burgeoning industry in Buenos Aires in medical tourism.

The bottom line was a quote for the work I wanted done at 21 thousand. This included interpreters, drivers, all xray and dental work. As well they put you up in a hotel for the time you are there. I needed two trips, six months apart to do the implants properly. My wife was 7 months pregnant the first time I went so she couldn't fly. This time I needed to be here for 28 days. I didn't want to be away from Carter or Tracey for that long, so we loaded up the family and flew south, for 24 hours, wheels up in Edmonton to wheels down in B.A.