Dentist gives veterans reason to smile: free dental care

Issaquah dentist gives veterans reason to smile: free dental care
When Dr. Theresa Cheng, a dentist and a mother, read a profile about a mother and her son who was severely wounded in Iraq, she was inspired to offer free dental care to veterans.
Seattle Times
By Sarah Zhang
Seattle Times staff reporter
October 31, 2013

Where to begin talking about what Rory Dunn has been through since his head was blown open that day in Fallujah? His best friend, who bled out next to him? His traumatic brain injury that has altered his personality? His forehead held together by a plastic prosthetic?

It’s hard to know where to begin, so Dr. Theresa Cheng concerns herself with what she knows best as a dentist: his teeth.

In the nine years since his unarmored Humvee in Iraq was hit by explosives on his 22nd birthday, Dunn has been making a long, hard recovery. His mother, Cynthia Lefever, has been by his side the whole time — sleeping next to her then-comatose son at Walter Reed Army National Military Medical Center and later traveling the country to advocate for veteran care.

Inspired by a profile of mother and son in The Seattle Times in 2008, Cheng, whose practice is in Issaquah, began providing free dental care for veterans in need and has signed on dozens of other professionals to do the same.

Cheng has three sons, now in their early 20s, and she remembers thinking what it must have been like for Dunn’s mother to get that phone call and to drop everything to go to her son in a hospital thousands of miles away.

“I was thinking how when something like this happens in your life, you just put everything else on hold,” Cheng said.

In the upheaval, dental care was sure to fall by the wayside — and she could do something about that.

Cheng originally planned to offer care to the wives of returning soldiers, thinking the vets got dental care through their veterans’ benefits. But she learned that the rules were more complicated, and for the most part, only vets who are considered completely disabled qualify for the dental program.
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