Patient Spotlight

Onyx’s Story

“I smile a lot more, like I used to.”

Extractions & complete dentures · connected through a Veterans Affairs housing program

For years, Onyx’s dentist was the emergency room. Two or three visits a year, every year, for abscesses: an antibiotic, no referral, and nowhere to go next.

Without dental insurance, that was the whole plan. “That was just all I could do,” he says. “Go to the ER, get an antibiotic, let it get cleared up.” Then wait for the next one.

The pain shaped everything. His teeth had gotten so bad that he forced himself onto a soft diet. Anything too hot or too cold meant immediate pain. On the worst days, even breathing through his mouth hurt. “That was just the way I had to live for years.”

Onyx is a veteran. When he entered a Veterans Affairs housing program, he was homeless and working to get back on his feet. Dr. McCord reached out to that program with one question: is there anyone here who needs dental work? “Literally everyone in the office was like, Onyx needs it.”

Through Mint for More he received extractions, immediate dentures, and now his complete set, fitted and delivered at no cost. The difference between the first set and this one? “Night and day. These don’t move around when I’m talking. They’ve actually suctioned to my gums like a set of dentures is supposed to.”

Since the extractions, the abscess cycle is over. No gum pain, no jaw pain, no more ER trips, and hundreds of dollars a year he no longer has to spend. He’s eating raw vegetables again for the first time in a very long time, and he can feel the difference: more energy and less brain fog, “because I’m able to get better nutrients into me.”

But the change he comes back to isn’t physical. Years of hiding rotten teeth carried “quite a bit of shame,” he says. “Since getting my teeth extracted, that shame has gone away. My self-confidence has risen, and I just smile a lot more, like I used to.”

Ask him about the team after seven appointments and he doesn’t hesitate: “I’ve been treated with the utmost respect. Every last one of y’all has listened to everything I’ve had to say.” He walked in expecting a doctor who wouldn’t listen. “That’s just not the case. He’s the best dentist I’ve ever seen, because he actually listens.”

What changed

We asked what he’d say to the donors who make this care possible. He went straight back to where he’d been: working to get off the streets, in dire financial distress, with nowhere to turn for his teeth.

“If not for donors like them, I wouldn’t have gotten the help that I so desperately needed.”

Onyx, to the donors who make free care possible