Then, I had to go to the dentist to get my annual teeth cleaning and I went to Dr. Mark for the first time. He kept bragging about how his office was the coolest and most decorated - not with dentistry recognition but instead with guitars and rock n' roll memorabilia. Scott was there for some reason, lying on the dentistry bed - yes, it was a bed and not a dentist chair. Mark sprayed down Scott with some sort of antiseptic spray so that I would feel safe, and then he took a look at my records to see what he was dealing with. He started to shake his head while he was reading and I told him that I hadn't been to the dentist in about a year because the dentist I'd gone to when I first got to California said that I only needed to go once a year. Dr. Mark readied all his tools as he explained that I needed to see a dentist every six months, no excuses. Finally, I got onto the bed and laid down next to Scott, and right before Dr. Mark was going to start, I asked him a question - was he on my insurance? He said no, he was on some different one, so I jumped out of the bed, got in my car and drove downtown to his office. No idea why his office and the dentist room were half an hour away. I parked my car up the street about a block from the office, so I had to cross at a roundabout; a woman had crossed the street before me with two of her kids, but she left the stroller with her baby in the middle of the crosswalk and didn't appear to be coming back for her third kid. I gently gave the stroller a push so that it at least would be out of the way of cars driving by, but only after I pushed it did I realize that I should have walked it across the street because it was going to hit the curb kind of hard. All it did was wake the baby up and get the attention of the weird mother; she turned around and seemed as if she was in a daze as she retrieved her baby and thanked me. I caught the eye of a driver in a white car who had stopped so as not to hit the stroller and we both rolled our eyes at her ineptitude. Then, I walked into Dr. Mark's office through a round facade which stood out from the rest of the buildings on that block and Dr. Mark's girlfriend in real life was there, answering phone calls. I thought she wasn't going to recognize me at first but she did; when she got off her phone call she started to vent about how she was going to quit because Mark couldn't keep a schedule, she never knew what hour he was in or what patient he was seeing. I tried to calm her down, but she just asked how she could help me. I asked her if any of the other dentists within the practice were on my insurance, and she said unfortunately, no.

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