mindsquirt

My mouth is a landfill of fillings, tooth decay, and gingavitus. There is also currently some cheetoe detritus but I just ate lunch.

I have multiple fillings in all of my molars and bicuspids. Since I was about 10 I have had to have a filing every time I went to the dentist (up until the last 2 visits). Once when I was 13 I had to have an enormous filling done and there was so little tooth left that the denist had to give up and make me a prostetic tooth. Here is a picture that captures what happend:

























He had to drill out a filling that was already there to make room for this crater in my mouth, and then gave up and just made a new tooth. He took some pictures of it. I asked him if it was so he could show off this disaster to his Dentist buddies. He said it was for a textbook but I could tell he was lying. This was a low point in my life. So later that week I burned up some of the crap in my sister's yard (but didn't use her composting toilet) .

It is very frustrating because I make tremendous use of my toothbrush, and try to floss at least once-every-other day. I am told my train-wreck of decaying teeth are genetic. I would be in great shape if teeth grew out like fingernails and you just had to trim them. (something to keep in mind when I start genetically engineering my own hybrid unicorn-cyborg-hobbit superbreed)

Last year I made two monumental dental hygine mistakes:

1) I went to a new dentist because I found a coupon in the mail
2) I went to a dentist that had “cosmologist dentist” on the outside of his building.

This guy’s plan was to charge me over $250 for digital x-rays of my teeth, show them to me, tell me how my current life situation is on account of all the decay in my mouth, and give me some preposterous treatment plan that included taking out all of my old fillings and crowing every tooth (8) to the tune of $7000. WTF!?

It didn’t occur to me that this guy was trying to rip me off. I didn’t know dentist were similar to auto mechanics in that they can easily suck you dry by telling you everything is a mess. I guess I assumed they had more dignity than that. whoopsie-daisey.

For the next week I was pretty depressed and I even asked a HR guy about the dental plan for a job I was interviewing for. This was one of my most famously idiotic ideas while job-hunting. That is how concerned I was. How was I going to come up with $7000?

I got a second opinion from a dentist I trusted* in Louisville a few months later and she basically told me everything was as pretty-as-a-picture. There was some trouble areas but she said we should just “watch it”. Sweet!

So I went from a $7000 overall to everything is peachy. It was crazy. I had no idea that there was such discrepancy in diagnosing dental work.

So, that was a revelation to me. I know this was a boring blog but I am mostly warning you guys out there to make sure that you can find a dentist you can trust. Other life lessons are make sure you have some sensible shoes that you can dress up or down and don't let your coworkers know about all of the food that you steal from them**.

*Karen Seymour @ "Seymour and Sims",4600 Bardstown Road, Louisville, KY 40218
** another blog on this coming soon