Nora L Ebio,DMD

I went to Dr. Ebio because I needed an in-​network (Blue Cross ppo) dentist in Oakland. I’d been seeing Dr. Julia Hallisy in San Francisco since high school, but it was no longer convenient for me to go over to Stonestown from Oakland.
I tend to be pretty blasé about choosing dentists, probably because I’ve never had a bad one. For some reason my main criteria for all health professionals is that they are women (do I trust women more? Perhaps I have a desire to support women in medicine? I’m not sure… Perhaps I’m just biased). Dr. Ebio was the only local, in-​network female dentist I could find, so out of convenience, I scheduled an appointment.
The office was cramped and all the equipment looked at least 30 years old. The gentleman at the front desk couldn’t have been kinder, but I found it odd that his office and the exam room were basically one and the same. He was making small talk with me and making calls while I was getting worked on.
Dr. Ebio was a bit too rough and silent for my liking. X-​rays have never hurt my mouth as much as they did that day, but when I protested, she didn’t really react or sympathize. She didn’t talk to me almost the entire time I was there.
To make things weirder, some of her relatives stopped by to drop off Christmas gifts (it was mid-​December) and came right into the office/​exam room. There I was, prone on the dentist chair, and they were chatting with her about their holiday plans. I understand that visiting the dentist is not exactly as personal or private as say, a trip to the proctologist, but still, I felt like my privacy was invaded.
The two good things that came out of the visit were relatively cleaner teeth and the knowledge (this was a 2^nd opinion) that my lower wisdom teeth are definitely fucked (or «sideways,» as Dr. Ebio put it) and need to come out. You can be sure that I’m going to a Unilocal-​approved oral surgeon (and not some hack I find on the Blue Cross website) for my wisdom tooth extraction.