Testimonials
More than a service.
A life changing experience.
“I could go on and on about my experience at Tepeyac Community Health Center. To make it short and sweet. I had an incredible experience. Every single person I talked to, starting with the receptionist to the last person who took my blood sample, was exceptionally kind and attentive to my needs. Visiting the doctor is never a very easy thing to do, but everyone made me feel very at ease.”
How Tepeyac became home for Cecilia and Sonia
Early cancer detection gave Irma a fighting chance
A regular eye check-up becomes a wake-up call for Jose
Juana shares her personal experience with Tepeyac
Stories of Our Work
Meet Maria, a 54-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking woman, who arrived at Tepeyac with a health crisis. She had lost a tremendous amount of weight and had become frail. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, was so ill that she couldn’t work, and was incredibly frightened. Maria’s physical health problems contributed to mental health challenges as well.
“I was so sick that I thought that I might not make it home, that I wasn’t going to survive…The Tepeyac team gave my life back to me.” -Maria
Three days after Maria visited Tepeyac and was started on the right medication, she felt significantly better. And as a standard component of care at Tepeyac, Maria’s physical health provider conducted a behavioral health screening; after receiving behavioral services at Tepeyac, Maria no longer experiences elevated anxiety or depression.
Our dental patient came to us on her first visit about a month ago, very ashamed and emotional about the condition of her teeth. She was crying and didn’t even want us to look at her teeth—she only kept asking to just have them all removed, and dentures placed. After hearing her story and letting her know she was in a safe space, she finally allowed us to take x-rays and to take a look. She had not been to the dentist in over 20 years and actually had very pretty teeth underneath the years of heavy tartar buildup.
The patient recently completed her 3rd visit and seems so much happier and proud of her smile. She no longer wants to extract all of her teeth and get dentures and she is beginning to smile more. It really is inspiring to see her confidence restored with just some basic dental care. She told Lucy the other day that, “ She is so grateful that God brought her to us.”
She does, however, need work that we cannot complete. She needs a partial and some crowns. We tried to refer her to another practice, but she refuses and wants to wait until we are able to treat her. We cautioned her that it could be over two years before we are able to complete the treatment that she needs and in the meantime her condition may worsen---she still wants to wait for us.
This “wait for us” message is one that is super common among the patients at Tepeyac. They feel at home with the care they receive and do not want to go anywhere else, even if it means waiting years. This is definitely a testament to the foundation the medical/behavioral health and entire team at Tepeyac has done to really build relationships with our families.
We had a new patient who moved to Denver from Boston. She was grieving because she felt uprooted from her community and family that she had established in Boston. She also was nervous moving here because she needed ongoing care for breast cancer. We were able to connect her to a local oncologist, so she did not have any lapse of care for her breast cancer. We continued her preventative care services and management of her chronic conditions. She also met with our Behavioral Health team for emotional support during the transitional period. She expressed that she gradually felt more comfortable here in Colorado and Tepeyac's support was a big part of her success. We saw her recently a year later and she was excited to be moving back to her community in Boston. At her last visit, she said that while she was nearly completely happy to be returning home, a small part of her regretted that she won't get to continue working with Tepeyac.
We just finished up with our last school dental visits for the year. On our Spring visits alone we saw approximately 110 kids in about 5 days at two schools.
Something wonderful that we noted this semester is that the kids remembered us from the Fall and most who had anxiety or required a lot of patient management were actually excited to see us this time!
One little girl in particular, a 3-year-old in the ECE program, wouldn’t even open her mouth for us in the Fall. We couldn’t do an exam without her getting very upset. Instead, we showed her our equipment and demonstrated brushing and flossing on our dinosaur model. Fast forward to our spring visit and this same little girl, jumped into our dental chair and said, “Mira mis dientes!” with a huge smile on her face. She remembered us from the Fall and said she had been working on brushing at home. Even though we weren’t able to complete the procedures we hoped to do with her in the Fall, we were patient and, as a result, made a positive impact on her—she was more than ready to see us 6 months later!
One of our patients is 85 years old and pretty set in his ways. He came to us after having a less than ideal experience at another clinic. He felt that they didn’t address his needs and basically just brushed him off (he thinks because he spoke Spanish). He definitely had his guard up at first and was at times, pretty difficult to manage. We didn’t give up and kept working with him to break down his walls. He ended up getting a lot of dental work done with us including extractions and fillings, and each time he grew warmer and warmer.
We got to the end of the restorative treatment that we could perform at the clinic and needed to refer him to another clinic to have partials made (which we didn’t do at the time). He refused to go anywhere else and wanted to wait for us to start making them. He patiently came back for each cleaning appointment, asking each time if we “were able to make his partial yet?”
A few weeks ago, we decided to introduce a new procedure—partials and the first person we called was this patient! He came in right away! We took his dental impressions, and he was so thrilled that we were going to be able to make his partials for him. He is now a patient we really look forward to seeing. He is kind, generous and truly a pleasure.
Our Services
Tepeyac offers medical care, behavioral health and wellness, dental care, pharmacy services and more.