Teef Revisited
I spent the morning at my second home, the dentist's office. I had to get a filling replaced, but when the dentist dug around a little bit, he discovered that I had one filling on top of another, like a layer cake, and that allowed for some nice decay to seep in. He took another horrifying picture of the drilled out wreck of a tooth and showed me how one of the sides of it is wanting to break off and be independent of my mouth. I like the image of that tooth campaigning to secede. I have to get another outlay put in (which is what I discovered I got last time, rather than a crown--outlays are less expensive and, according the dentist, "more conservative."). After they took another mold of this offending tooth, I went directly to get my teeth cleaning finished up from last time. Suffice it to say that more scraping ensued. I'll spare you the gorey details, but apparently I had a lot left to go. It was quite thorough, and my teeth had better be the picture of dental health right now.

Anyway, I need to go back to get my outlay put in, in a couple of weeks, and then go back two MORE times to get fitted for a mouth guard, since I'm grinding my teeth into oblivion. Without insurance, a fitted mouth guard costs a cool $450, but since I was expecting it to be like $600, my reaction was to the tune of: "what a bargain!" How pathetically skewed my perspective has become after all of this dental work.

No major bills yet for the recent work done, and I'm frightened of when that hammer drops. Let this be a lesson to everyone: never skip your regular dental visits if you have insurance, otherwise you pay the piper. And my piper's name is Dr. Balshaw.