Raising to Rise
A clinic and a baby arrived at the same time, and she has been evolving while she grows them.
The first thing I noticed in the lobby is a letter, lit against the concrete wall. A lowercase g, except to me, it had been made into a face. A tooth sits where the eye would go, with a root, the part underneath. The bottom curves into a smile. A small dot floats off the top like an antenna, and the whole thing turns friendly, almost a character, something built to make you feel warm before anyone says a word. I looked at the g for a while. I thought of generative. What is she making, I thought.
Her assistant came out to greet me. She said Dr. Erin would be out shortly, she was finishing with a patient.
When Dr. Erin came out, she walked me through the office first. Four rooms not built out yet. Then we sat down.
TWO AT ONCE
She found the neighborhood before she found the space. She and her husband, Mark, had decided to stay in the city. They met here, and they like it, the restaurants mostly, which she said is their main hobby. "As I was shopping at Whole Foods, I was like, oh, this area is really nice," she said. "That's how I ended up finding this."
She had Mark drive around with her, looking for vacant spaces. She found one across the street first. The broker told her the corner unit was open too, and thought it was a better fit. It sits right across from that same Whole Foods. The two of them face each other now.
The space had been a sushi restaurant, an all-you-can-eat place called House of Sushi that she used to go to in college. She hadn't known it was the same address. "Randomly one day I was like, oh, I used to eat sushi somewhere around here," she said. "I Googled it, and it happened to be that address." You've gone full circle, I said. She had.
She wanted to start from scratch. "There's two paths to ownership," she told me. "There's the startup, where you start from scratch. Or you buy somebody's existing practice." She had spent about ten years at her father's, long enough to know what you take on when you buy in. "You're finding random issues that you didn't know existed," she said. Starting clean, she could hire the people she wanted. "That's how I ended up deciding to open up a scratch practice."
Then, right before she signed the lease, she found out she was pregnant.
She and Mark had been trying for a while. Around the time she was ready to sign, they had talked about stopping. "Maybe we should stop trying," she remembered saying. That same month, she found out. The baby brought her luck, and when I said so, she agreed.
A baby and a practice, at the same time.
WHAT SHE INHERITED
Dr. Erin grew up in dentistry. Her father is a dentist in the Glenview and Niles area, where there is a large Korean community. Her brother is a dentist too. Her parents both came from South Korea and met here in college, her mother studied piano, her father did dental school nearby. She and her brother were born here.
It would have been easy, I said, to just follow them. The road was already there.
"My dad is a dentist," she said. "The plan was to just finish dental school and work with him." She did, for about ten years. "I learned a lot working with my dad."
What she learned was the part dental school does not teach. "I've had a lot of experience to see what works, and what's possible, beyond what dental school says," she said. Beside her father, over years, she got to watch what happens when you wait, when you leave something alone instead of treating it. "Less is more," she said. She learned what is okay to leave, and what is not.
I asked what makes her own practice different. She talked about the patients who come in from somewhere else, carrying a bad experience. Some of them, she said, have felt scolded. One had told her they felt hopeless. She is careful not to make people feel that way. When she finds a cavity, she shows it to them. "Showing them what that cavity looks like, so that they can see," she said. She puts the photo up and walks them through it. "That education piece, it does take a little bit more time," she said. "But people really appreciate it."
IN THE FOG
I told her she had a situation a lot of people might recognize, planning for a baby and building something at the same time, and I asked how she had managed both.
She said she had no advice. Then she told me how it happened.
When she and Mark first got married, she went around to her dental groups asking how to sequence her life. House, then office, then baby. "I was so meticulous," she said. "I was like, which order should I do things in." She had heard the story before, the female dentist who ends up doing all of it at once. "I definitely don't want to do both at the same time," she remembered thinking. "That would be awful."
Someone told her it does not work that way. "You don't really plan for that," she said they told her. "You just have to deal with whatever comes." The lease and the pregnancy came the same month.
She did both at once.
You just have to unfortunately go through it.
"You just have to unfortunately go through it," she said. "If you want both, it's going to be hard. There's going to be moments where you kind of wish that you didn't choose this path." Then other days you are glad, she said. Both are true. "I'm in the fog of it right now."
I asked what the hardest part was. Not being able to give either one all of her. "I wanted to be there more for my baby," she said. Her mother-in-law was living with them, helping. The baby would get her attention and the practice would slip, or she would be at the practice and thinking about the baby. She has gotten better at managing her time. She is still overwhelmed by how much there is.
There was something she had not expected, and it was not the love. It was how much of a relationship it would be. It still feels surreal to her that he is here. She told me about bringing him home from the hospital, how strange it was, this small person she was suddenly responsible for. "You get to know your child, because they just appear, and you're like, what." His personality has come out over the year. She has watched it happen. "It motivates me to work a little bit harder," she said, "so that we have a good foundation."
WHAT IT'S FOR
I asked where she saw the practice in a few years.
"I'm actually working on that right now," she said. It was one of her projects, the one she worked on in the time she had, writing the ideas down. The first thing she talked about was not the patients. "One thing I'm really focusing on is the team culture," she said. She wanted the office to feel right for the people working in it first. Light-hearted people, she said, "that want to do the right thing for other people, that care for what they're doing."
What she wants is one place, done completely. "I only envision a single office," she said. She has watched people run four or five, and she does not want that. "I don't understand how they do that." One office she can actually stand behind. "Really exceptional dentistry that is impactful, helping others, but something that people working here feel really good about doing every day." She is taking it slow on purpose.
I only envision a single office.
She got that from one of her teachers. John Kois runs a training center she has gone back to many times, and he is in his seventies now. "He's always looking to improve," she said. "Every time you come back, he's always added something." Small changes, she said. "These small changes that you have to continue to make, that will eventually make a measurable difference." People notice. "Those small details, that you've listened, or made and adapted."
None of it is about size. She wants one practice solid enough to keep her family in the city they chose, doing work she believes in, with people who believe in it too. The slow part is deliberate. She is building something she means to be standing in for a long time.
When we finished, I looked at the letter in the lobby again. The tooth with its root. The smile. The little antenna that made it friendly before anyone said a word.
What is she making? A practice, slowly, one room at a time, four still to build. A son, who arrived a stranger and became someone she knows. And in the doing of both, without setting out to, herself.
She named the practice Regen, for regeneration, for making something whole out of what is already there. She meant it about teeth, about bone, about the body she repairs. Standing in the lobby, before I knew the name, I had read the letter as something simpler. Generative. Something that makes. What I had not seen yet was that she was also the thing being made, the same year, by the same hands. She is still in the middle of it.
Questions worth asking your dentist
Dr. Erin's approach can be translated into a short list of questions worth asking any dentist. She did not give me this list. I assembled it from the way she practices.
Do you look at more than just my teeth?
Dr. Erin is building toward what she calls a wellness practice. One thing she is adding is salivary testing, which tells you what kinds of bacteria are actually in your mouth. Some bacteria do more damage to the body than others, and your mouth does not stop at your teeth. A dentist thinking about your whole health, not just the surface, is asking a bigger question than most.
Does this need treating now, or can we watch it?
Working beside her father for years, Dr. Erin got to see what actually happens when you wait instead of treating right away. She has a sense of what is okay to leave alone and what is not. Not every finding needs immediate work. It is worth asking what happens if you wait, and coming back to look again later.
Can you show me what you're seeing?
When Dr. Erin finds a cavity, she puts the photo up and walks you through it. She would rather you understand why you need something than simply be told. A dentist who shows you the evidence, and takes the time to explain it, is a dentist who wants you to see your own mouth clearly.
Is there a more conservative option before anything permanent?
For cosmetic work, Dr. Erin looks for the least invasive path first, taking the smallest amount of enamel, bonding to the healthy tooth underneath, planning it digitally before anything is touched. Before agreeing to anything that permanently changes your natural teeth, it is worth asking what the more conservative version would be.
Exploring artistry and the spaces in between.
