The Real Deal

A few weeks after your temporaries, your porcelain beauties will be ready. You may have crowns, dental veneers, dental implants, bridges or a combination, but they will be all porcelain, built to go together, and quite unlike any piecemeal dental work you’ve had done in the past. You are about to undergo a true smile makeover.

You will need a day to have the work done, and you will be tired that night (or should be, more on that later) and Dr. Golpa will want to see you back the next day to adjust your bite. This time I took the week off and brought my teenaged daughter, staying with a friend and her children at the beautiful Mandalay Bay.

I was just so excited. It was hard to believe that this was finally going to happen.

When I went to Dr. Golpa’s office, they immediately got me comfortable and relaxed. Before beginning any serious sedation, Dr. Golpa showed me my new teeth. Even he was excited by how pretty they turned out - and folks, this is something that gets to me about Smile Designs by Golpa. They really are into what they’re doing there - as often as they’ve done it, you get the sense that they still find what they do amazing. Dr. Golpa told me once he’s seen grown men sit in the chair and cry when they see their new smiles. He said it is the best feeling in the world, to be able to do something that means that much to somebody, to witness and be a part of somebody’s transformation.

A few more words about Dr. Golpa - the man is, in my opinion, a genius. He’s a quiet man, and tends to get bashful when you try to talk to him about the high opinion his patients and peers have of his work. He acts like it’s nothing - but it’s not nothing, believe me. A lot of the cost of a smile makeover is for the lab work and the building of the teeth themselves - but he alone is worth his weight in gold, for all of that is wasted without the skills and the vision he has. He has a photographic memory for anything he reads, and he is a perfectionist.

When he was learning new techniques and procedures, he didn’t just go to classes or seminars and then come home and start up on patients. He hires experts to stand beside him, even, I’m told, after he no longer really needs them there, just to be absolutely certain that he is doing everything perfectly. There are very few doctors of any kind that are that careful to make sure their patients never suffer while they master new skills.

Finally, there is his specialization in aesthetics. There is no “degree” in cosmetic dentistry, no school you go to learn to be a cosmetic dentist specifically. Any dentist can practice cosmetic dentistry, but Dr. Golpa is far from somebody who went to a few seminars and trainings and picked up some new techniques. He studied every aspect of aesthetic dentistry available for over 10 years, and as I mentioned before, he is one of the most skilled dental implant specialists in the country, if not the world. He does all of the implant, so there is no need to see one doctor for the surgery and another to build the reconstructed tooth, which is the way it’s usually done.

He’s very intense while working on his patients, but also amazingly gentle. He constantly asks if you are having pain and will take steps immediately to alleviate any discomfort you do have.

Thanks to sedation dentistry, the hours spent carefully building my full mouth reconstruction are again a blur, although I do remember Dr. Golpa talking to me and the staff making sure I was warm and comfortable. And I do remember them standing above me, smiling and telling me how gorgeous my teeth were.

My friend took me back to the hotel, where I slept for a little bit, and then jumped out of bed and headed for the mirror. Wow. Oh wow. Beautiful, white teeth, no matter how close you looked. By the way, I was counseled not to get the whitest shade available, as it could look unnatural with my coloring. That was good advice, as they were still as pearly white as could be.

I felt so refreshed within a few hours, my friend and I went out for dinner. We met a couple of attractive young men and one of them kept saying, “You have the whitest teeth I have ever seen. They’re perfect!” The other one, almost half my age, had to have a kiss before I left, or rather was dragged away, by my friend, who was worried that my new teeth had really gone to my head!

I returned home to more of the same, although interestingly, not everybody noticed immediately, which I think is testimony to the natural look of Dr. Golpa’s smile makeovers. Often people would ask what I was doing, was it my hair, what was it?

And guess what? Porcelain doesn’t stain like natural tooth enamel. Day after day, even looking into the dreaded rear-view mirror in broad daylight, you never have to see anything but dazzling, perfectly shaped teeth. There is no such thing as a bad smile day. It’s an enormous confidence booster, something you can always depend on, in a world where you can depend on so little, and for me, at an age where changes for the better can be difficult to pull off.

I did experience a few aches and pains as my teeth, nerves and jaw adjusted to their new positions, but again, Ibuprofen handled most everything. None of it was of any consequence compared to the way I felt every time I looked in the mirror.