Dental Drama: The Toddler Edition

Joel took Ethan in today for his first dental visit, and it wasn't good news. He has a cavity that needs to get sealed off so that it doesn't get worse and potentially cause major problems with his mouth and possibly health. Unfortunately, we don't have dental coverage for him. Paying cash means that they'll work with us on payments, but we still have to put down a hefty deposit ($350) before they'll consider working with us. I haven't asked them yet if they accept Care Credit, which is sort of a medical/dental/health credit card, but maybe if they do we can use what's left on my card to pay for the services. It's going to be a total of around $1300 to take care of his poor tooth. Ouch.

And you want to hear something weird? The dentist wants us to floss Ethan's teeth. Floss? At his age? I honestly don't think I flossed until I was a young adult. Like, even in high school, which is so gross now that I look back on it. But to think that my poor little guy is already having dental issues, when I treated my teeth so horribly and didn't have any major issues at such a young age, just confuses and saddens me.

Bad mom award, for not keeping his teeth pristine until he can do it himself. :(

Dental Disaster: Epic Proportions

And so it continues. The fourth set of crowns has now been rejected, after they were put in and my sister took one look in the dentist's office before exclaiming, "Absolutely not! They look like she bought them at a Halloween store!" And it was true. They were so short as to be laughable, and the bottom of each front tooth actually angled up towards the center, making a sort of inverted "v" in the middle of my smile. On my tiny, teeny, short little front teeth. JEEZ LOUISE!!! What the heck, is one of the dental deities pissed off at me, or what? Will this ever end? What do I do if I go back another time, and it's still horrible? I feel like giving up on these damn things and going to another doctor, but I already owe $1660 on these-- which means I no longer have enough on my Care Credit account to even *go* to another dentist!

(sigh)

I am seriously so disappointed. Not much else to say, except that I pray that I can get that job; at least then I'd have insurance, and thus another option for getting my teeth fixed before Christmas.

Toothy Endeavors

Later this morning, I have my umpteenth visit with the dentists at Standiford Family Dental. Way back in July, my adventures in toothlessness began... and they have yet to end. This is I believe the fourth time I've gone back for my permanent crowns, and I have serious doubts that they will be up to par. Again. Every time, there is something seriously wrong with the crowns. The first set were so oddly angled that they stuck out of my closed mouth and rested visibly on my lips, a la the most stereotypical set of buck teeth you can imagine. The second set were laying atop each other, tilted at a strange angle, one tooth was super-thick, they arched like a Mickey D's sign, and they left me with gaps all around the teeth. The third set, which I just went in to get fitted a couple of weeks ago, were so short that they were smaller than the teeth on either side. AND they also gave me gaps in between my teeth and on each side, which seems to be a theme with this office.

What the heck, people?! How many times do I have to go back before they get it right? How long am I going to be stuck going here? Well, I have one answer: This is the last time. If they don't look good today, I'm going to go back to my old dentist, the one I can't really afford, and get it done right. At this point, I don't care how much it costs. If I have to, I'll go to small claims court, file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and the Dental Board of California Consumer Affairs Dept., and anyone else I have to in order to get this taken care of right. Who knew good dentists would be so hard to find?

Dental Disaster

Just a quick note-- Wednesday morning, just as I walked into the fabric store to buy a replacement "foot" for my sewing machine, I felt something kind of grinding and scratchy in my mouth. I reached up to rub whatever it was off of my front tooth, but guess what? It didn't come off-- it was already gone. "It" was part of my veneer, which had apparently shattered a bit sometime that morning, and finally slid off just then, leaving a narrow triangle of veneer gone from my tooth. Great. Not exactly what I wanted to have happen when I'm sitting here unemployed, without insurance, and with a bank account that basically has enough money for one more month of rent & bills-- and not much else.

I went home and called around to various dentist's offices, where I found out that the entire veneer would have to be replaced, at a cost of $600-900 plus x-rays and exam. Ack! I immediately went online to see if I could qualify for Care Credit, a sort of credit card/credit line for medical, vision, and dental expenses. The whole time I was stressing out, because there would be no way we could pay for the repair without using Care Credit. I'm just not willing to fix my tooth at the cost of paying rent. But, good news: I qualified! I set up the appointment for Wednesday afternoon, and asked my sister to babysit. I even got a cheaper estimate (around $650) for the veneer replacement, and it looked like things were working out, for once... and then I went to the appointment.

The office manager and dentist informed me that because I'd had those two root canals on my front teeth (which had been damaged in my 2003 car accident), I wouldn't be able to do the veneers. Instead, I'd have to do crowns, and on both teeth would be better so that I wouldn't have to just wait for the other tooth's veneer to crack off one day and go through the whole process again. I agreed-- which brought the price up to $1600-- and they got started right there. It was so painful! Even the shots brought me to tears; my hands were shaking for like 10 minutes after the roof-of-the-mouth shot. Then the grinding, and chipping away, and filing... it convinced me that I would not be a very good torture candidate. I would give up anyone or anything if they put me through that kind of stuff without pain relief; I'm just too much of a wuss.

At the end, they asked me to choose the tooth color I wanted, and I had to look in a mirror to see the utter destruction wrought up on my poor front teeth. They looked like they'd been filed down to about one quarter of their usual size, like little posts poking out of my purple, swollen gums... it was horrid. Sorry to be so descriptive, but I literally felt ill to see them like that. I had to put the mirror down and just asked the dentist to choose for me. The last thing she did was make a temporary "bridge" type thing that fit over my little tooth stumps (!!!). When I saw it, I gasped. It looks horrible! Ugly, hideous, disgusting. It's lumpy and misshapen and hardly even looks like teeth at the gumline. Sure, it will pass at a distance if I don't lift my lips past the mid-point on my teeth, but if I smile widely or laugh, it's obvious and just terrible. The worse news came when I got to the front to pay and set up my next appointment-- which wouldn't happen for another two to three WEEKS!!! AAAAARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!! How am I going to get through it?! I just can't leave the house! Not to mention the painfulness; this is seriously so uncomfortable. Ugh. What a total disaster.