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Look Ma, no cavities!


MickinMD

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I got my temporary crown removed, permanent crown glued on, teeth checked and cleaned during an hour and a half ordeal.

So here are my perfect upper and crooked-lower-front teeth, gleaming and mirroring the background and as white as they're likely to be until sometime in 2021. Doc Gail says, "We no longer brush our teeth. We brush our gums - work on them." Of course, the dark spots in the corners are blood from her digging into my gums.  I've got some extra-cold (freezer-chilled) diet iced tea to kill the pain a little and I got a big bowlful of my homemade chicken soup in the freezer to eat for dinner tonight with fresh-cooked egg noodles.  That will be easy to chew!  Or maybe the Costco Lasagna I've got in the freezer - that's soft.

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Someone asked how much it would cost me when I reported here a month ago about the emergency temporary crown. My bill including my $20 annual deductible plus 20% of the crown was $167.  A replacement filling to come is 100% paid by insurance.

No cavities were found but she's going to replace a good filling with a bigger one because there's too much space between two back molars and food gets caught there too much.  So I've got one more Dental appointment on Oct. 7. She's good, popular, and there are dental specialists who go to her so it's hard to get a quick appointment.  Thank God and us chemists for fluoridated water (Baltimore's water supply got it first in the nation around 1948!) and fluoridated toothpaste because they have a lot more to do with me not having dentures a month from turning 70 than my dental hygiene habits!  In my 40's in the '90's I had an uncle in his mid-70's who had no children and was surprised I had all my teeth except the wisdom teeth.  When I said his other nieces and nephews in their 30's to 50's also had all their teeth he was amazed.  For my parents' raised-in-The-Depression generation, almost all I knew had dentures or partial plates by their 40's. My mother got a partial plate in her 60's and was considered exceptional by her friends.

Every time I'd grimace during cleaning and cavity checking, Doctor Gail Myers would say, "Damn it, THAT'S what you get for not flossing!"

I brought in the assortment of floss related stuff that I've only begun using regularly to ask her advice and how best to use.

Doc Gail thought these are ok if they don't tear for me, but they tore for her when she demonstrated on me how to get to my back teeth best and she prefers the regular minted floss: These get between my teeth very easy, so I hope they hold up.

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She recommended and gave me a starter pack of the Listerine Ultraclean Access Flosser, with a nice long handle and replaceable heads which are $3.97 for 28 at Amazon. I told her I the twin-line plackers because comments on Amazon said they clean better, but the double pieces of floss were tricky to get out from between my molars. She said cut one of the floss pieces and use them up.

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Finally, the GUM Dental Picks that she had recommended to me a couple years ago we both like.  When I get strands of meat caught between molars. the tiny bristle brush works great on pushing/pulling it out and scrubbing between teeth.

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1 cavity today. Dr "Painless" Schwartz pulled the tooth. It was an upper wisdom tooth with nothing below it to bite down on. Tuesday he looked at the x ray & we were thinking about redoing the filling. If it was too close to the pulp he was going to pull it. He thought about it in between & reco that we yank it. It is surprisingly easy to pull a tooth out. 30 minutes door to door including novacaine, waiting for it to take effect, chit chat, talk about the birds out the window & various & other stuff

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My last dentist visit, they planned a couple thousand dollars work, gave me a stack of itemized billing items, each tooth got it's own piece of paper, some  (most) more than one. Hidden in the middle of the stack was a power toothbrush, for way more than Walmart charges.

I never did go back.

 

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