Patient Spotlight

Mickey’s Story

“I didn’t forget how to smile.”

New dentures · referred through Micah 6.8

Mickey came to Mint for More with dentures that had never worked. The lowers didn’t fit, and never really had. So the team didn’t patch the problem. They made her a full new set, uppers and lowers, built for her.

On delivery day, she got her final dentures, the first new set she’s ever had.

“I never got a new set. Never,” she says. Years ago she dropped her old dentures and broke a tooth, and kept telling herself she’d get it fixed someday. She had insurance cards. She had Medicaid. What she didn’t have was any way to cover what they wouldn’t.

Ask her how she would have gotten dentures without Mint for More and she doesn’t hedge: “I wouldn’t.”

A referral through our partner Micah 6.8 changed that. That’s how every neighbor reaches Mint for More: not a waiting list, not a lucky break, but a nonprofit partner that knows them and sends them our way.

Mickey has been through more than her share. Skin cancer followed her from childhood until she was fifty, with several surgeries along the way. Even on denture delivery day there was another stop on the list, for a new set of hearing aids that weren’t working right yet. She’d tell you the smile went missing somewhere in all of it. But sitting in the chair with her new teeth in, she put it differently.

“Well, I feel a lot better,” she said. “And I didn’t forget how to smile.”

She’s realistic about the adjustment. “I’m definitely gonna wear them,” she promised, then added with a grin: “I might have to take smaller bites first.”

What changed

We asked her what she’d say to the donors who paid for her care.

“I would tell them how wonderful they were. I am thankful. I couldn’t wait to get here.”

Mickey, to the donors who make free care possible