Truth be told, over the past couple of years since I've gotten the hook up with the scale payment system at CFHC, I have been keeping up with my regular cleanings and my scheduled visits for exams.
Of course, as you may remember, this was all inspired by quite the heady need. One of my teeth was actually disintegrating, and, before long, it pretty much did. The procedure to take care of that wasn't covered by the poor person's scale, I had to pay out of pocket to the tune of almost 400 bucks.
I've asked hygienists whether or not they thought having bad teeth was a matter of genetics since, as I admitted to them, I come from a family of crappy teeth. Both my parents had full dentures before they were even 30. My sister had most of her teeth removed well before she became an adult, but admittedly, a lot of that was due to her rough and tumble life of living on the street as a raging alcoholic at the age of 16. Not sure about my brother, but let's just say he never smiled much after he reached puberty or so. There could be a lot of reasons for that, teeth notwithstanding. The hygienists that I inquired to deflected the nature explanation and leaned towards the nurture, indicating it was more due to hygiene habits and food stuff choices. And I guess I got to say, this makes a lot of sense.
My parents, obviously not being very good on hygiene, in the oral sense, themselves, weren't that demonstrative when it came to teaching us kids how to take care of our teeth. They just barked the obligatory parental-sounding "brush your teeth" mumble as we marched off to bed, to which I think we all summarily ignored. And as far as what we ate, I've mentioned many times we lived high on the hog as far as food goes since both of them for most of our upbringing years worked and made full-time salaries, yet lied to the government in order to get subsidized housing (and later, a low-income mortgage deal I'd guess) as well as food stamps, so therefore we ate fancy steak dinners, shrimp, lobsters, you name it, but being kids of the 1970s, we also ate a lot of processed foods like all the super sugary cereals Madison Avenue could possibly push on us, every candy bar known to man, and my favorite, Chef Boyardee right out of the can! So now in my 60s it's payback time.
Throughout the 80s and '90s I've had my fair share of cavities and the massive amounts of amalgam used to fill all of them by Dr. B especially, then came the financial challenges of the new millennium as well as the general lack of overall healthcare and, well, my teeth really went to hell in a hand basket. All that amalgam started deteriorating without much spackle and paste to maintain them and a little crumble here and a little crack there and before you know it, we're were we are today in this decade...the decade where I think I have to think about joining my parents legacy.
All the dental professionals of this day and age are aghast at the idea of full dentures, even for people my age. They expect folks to keep their teeth, well, I guess to the grave. But I think they're thinking of it from the perspective of either the very well insured or the well endowed financially that can pay for the regular fiscal responsibility of maintaining natural teeth, especially with a set like mine that have had less than stellar care over the past fifty odd years of their existence since replacing those baby teeth oh so long ago.
If we take into account the surgical extraction I had to have two years ago, and what may be lingering around the corner quite soon, and the next few years down the road, what are we looking at? 400 bucks a year? 800 bucks a year? Bit by bit? Chunk by chunk? As I have to accommodate to less and less of an ability to chew efficiently with what I have left? And always with the specter of the remainder having a limited shelf life and the potential unexpected aches and pains as well? It's not so hard to think, "Why not spend the one to two grand or whatever it would be, and be done with it once and for all?"
So what brings all this on? One of the things I've discovered with having dental cleanings every four months (yes that's the schedule I'm on now, it sounds crazy to me, but that's what they are telling me is, "normal") is that when the tartar that has built-up over the decades is really stripped totally away, it reveals little micro cracks and fissures that expose my teeth to incursions. At least that's my theory since the two x-rays I've had over the past couple years don't seem to be exposing too many outright cavities, according to the dentists at this place.
Now there is one that they say is apparent, and they showed it to me on the newest x-rays (shown below) but I can't remember which it is now, but I'll be having that one treated in a few weeks, but as I've been feeling lately, I have occasional pain and temperature sensitivity in at least two other regions outside of that tooth closer to the molars on both sides top and bottom.
The dental hygienist doing the cleaning this week told me that the tooth on the left side that I said was giving me occasional pain, is so overly filled with old amalgam, that there probably isn't a chance for it to be refilled. If they tried to replace the amalgam that's there already, the the remaining tooth wall would collapse. And of course I know what that means...back to the oral surgeon.
Last night I was taking a sip of iced tea and I was feeling some deep sensitivity in the upper right side farther back than the Number 5 tooth that they're going to deal with in a few weeks. Is it due to the cavity that is present in Number 5? Or is it another problem? I don't know. (BTW, the numbers on these x-rays don't make sense to me, I don't know which is Number 5.) I look at these x-rays and I just see x-rays of teeth with a bunch of white blotches which I guess are all that amalgam, oh and the big white blotch that is that gold crown.
I can sense it now, I really am going to have to have that crown pulled in order to sell it to pay for the remainder of the others. I remember back in the '80s, before it was installed, Dr. B let me hold it. It surely is solid gold. Now I'm sure it's not 24-karat of course. That would be way too soft. But still, maybe 16-karat? It felt, as I remember, like it might have weighed about maybe five grams or so. I wonder what that would be on today's market?
Welcome to American healthcare, especially dental care for which it's almost impossible to get really good insurance coverage without a really good employer plan or expensive monthly premiums. Makes you think the designers of such a system as this might have been in the mindset of somebody like the old Nazi in the picture above. Makes me feel a little like Dustin Hoffman.