Bizarre though it sounds, it was a chipped tooth and an incompetent Mexican dentist that saved Brian Heit’s life.

Had he not damaged the tooth while on vacation, and had that dentist not made an awful mess of the repair work, lung cancer might have devoured Heit.

“I suppose it’s funny to think of, but I am serious. That saved my life,” the St. Catharines regional councillor says.

The dental work was so bad five years ago that Heit needed surgery in St. Catharines to fix it. As part of a routine pre operation work up, Heit had blood drawn and an x-ray of his chest taken.

“So shortly after the operation I’m at home and I get a call from my doctor asking me to come in and see him to discuss the results of my tests,” Heit says. “At first I was confused. I didn’t have any tests done. But it was the tests they did before my operation.”

The tests revealed Heit might have lung cancer. Later medical scans confirmed it.

“I was shocked. Totally shocked,” says Heit.

He had been a smoker but that was more than 20 years ago. How, he thought, could this have happened?