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Dentists, Puns, and Money is a podcast focused on two things: The financial topics relevant to dentists leaving clinical practice and the stories and lessons of dentists who have already done so.
1. The stories of dentists who have transitioned from full-time clinical dentistry.
2. The financial topics that are relevant for dentists making that transition.
If you’re a dentist thinking about your exit from clinical, and you’d like to learn from the experiences of other dentists who have made that transition, be sure to subscribe to your favorite podcast app.
Host Shawn Terrell also dives deep into the many financial components of exiting dentistry, including tax reduction strategies and how to live off your assets.
And, we try to keep it light by mixing in a bad joke… or two.
Please note: Dentists, Puns, and Money was previously known as The Practice Growth Podcast until March 2022.
Shawn Terrell (00:01.454)
Welcome to Dentists, Puns and Money. I am your host, Shawn Terrell, continuing the story of the health challenges that I've experienced in the last year and a half. A little backstory: I have ridden from the Des Moines area to Iowa City on Interstate 80 Eastbound hundreds of times in my life, but I have never had a ride like the one I had in early June of 2023. It's the middle of the night,
I can't see, and I know we're going the wrong way.
I'm being transferred from a hospital in downtown Des Moines to the University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City because in the last 24 hours I started experiencing double-vision and they're trying to figure out what's going on. So that's why I can't see plus the fact that it's middle of the night. But I can make up enough of the landmarks that I can see.
Outside the window to realize that we are not
the time I speak up and alert the ambulance driver to this, she turns around and starts going the other way on the interstate. But doesn't really acknowledge the fact that we spent at least 10 minutes driving the wrong way. And for the first time in the last 24 hours, given everything that's happened, I feel a little bit anxious and nervous and upset about what's going on.
Shawn Terrell (01:37.386)
I'm strapped to a gurney in this ambulance being transferred to Iowa City. Never been a passenger as a patient in an ambulance probably in my entire life up until 24 hours ago. And now this was my second ambulance ride in the last 24 hours. So back up to earlier that day, which would have been
Friday morning, June 2nd, I woke up and something was wrong with my eyes. I couldn't see right. I had double-vision and everything was blurry. After giving it a little bit of time to pass, I jumped on the computer and started Googling double-vision and quickly realized that that is not a good sign. If you have double-vision, it's usually a sign of something serious, something serious that has gone wrong with your brain.
So I did a virtual health visit at first, which was difficult to set up and log in considering that I couldn't really see or type, but I figured it out. The virtual telehealth person told me to go to urgent care or the emergency room. I chose urgent care, had my wife who was home that day give me a ride to urgent care. We had a
baby that was nursing at the time and didn't know how long this was all going to take or how serious it was at first. And so I just had her drop me off at Urgent Care in West Des Moines about 10 minutes from our house. As we rode there, I was very glad that I asked her to drive because I could not see very well at all or definitely not well enough to drive. And I wouldn't drive again for several months, but I'll get to that. So I go to Urgent Care.
get right in, they tell me I need to go to the ER and I should probably go there by ambulance. So I take them up on that, take an ambulance ride from West Des Moines to downtown Des Moines to a hospital and I'm sent to the emergency room where after being evaluated and scanned a bunch of times, within an hour or two come in and tell me that I had a small stroke, which sort of blew me away because I
Shawn Terrell (04:02.205)
didn't really know much about strokes at that time and other than the double-vision, felt pretty good or at least not like I thought you might feel after having a stroke. So that's what they thought happened but they didn't know what caused it. And one of the scans or one of the MRIs or whatever it was was showing something funny on my brain which they thought might be a brain tumor. So they wanted to transfer me to a different hospital.
and eventually decided to transfer me to the hospital in Iowa City, which in Iowa is probably the most specialized hospital that you can go to. So I figured out pretty quickly it was serious. And the only problem was getting to Iowa City, which was probably 10 miles out of our way, but I did make it to Iowa City okay. Not a fun trip. Didn't sleep at all, even though I was exhausted.
and got to the hospital in Iowa City very early in the morning on Saturday, June 3rd, 2023. And eventually they determined through a bunch of specialists there and a bunch more scans and MRIs that I had an arterial dissection in the left vertebral artery in my neck, which sort of made sense because I had pain
and a headache and on the left side of my head for, I don't know, several weeks, maybe even a month leading up to that. So no brain tumor, good. Arterial dissection, bad. But the good news was other than the double-vision, they didn't think anything else was seriously wrong with me. But they kept me in Iowa City overnight just to be sure and to run a bunch more scans and to figure out the best way to treat the problem.
Eventually I was admitted, as I just mentioned, and the most unnerving part of that was being in the stroke unit in Iowa city, where there was in my same room section, whatever you want to call it, another man who was on a ventilator and completely unable to talk or communicate. And according to the nurse who was attending to both of us, pretty much not there, as he said. And so,
Shawn Terrell (06:26.48)
I had a fleeting thought that that would just be a terrible existence to be on a ventilator in a hospital for an extended period of time and not really know what was going on or be able to communicate. Eventually, the next day I was discharged from the hospital in Iowa City, but not before meeting with a neurosurgeon or a team of neurosurgeons who
evaluated my scans and were trying to determine whether or not I needed a stent in my neck to treat the arterial dissection that they determined I had. They decided that given the severity of things and my age and everything put together that I did not need a stent, which I was at the time very relieved for because I did not want to stay in the hospital any longer and certainly did not want to have surgery if I didn't have to. So I was sort of relieved that I could go home that day.
and recover at home, which the frustrating thing about having a stroke is a lot of times the treatment plan is just time. There's not much you can do. There's not much they can tell you to do except wait around and wait for your vision to come back. But that might take weeks or months or longer, and it might not come back the way it was before at all. So I end up back in West Des Moines at my house less than, well,
right around 48 hours after everything happened. And they gave me aspirin and a few other medications to treat things, but nothing too aggressive, I guess. And in hindsight, that was probably, not probably, was a mistake. And things would take a different turn in the days ahead. And there was another ambulance ride in my future, the third one in less than a week. But this one I would not remember.
and I'll get into more of that on the next episode. But that's enough for today. Thanks for listening, thanks for watching, and thanks for following along.