Happiness Challenge: Day 20

Today I am happy that we have dental insurance. I've been doing the dance with a painful tooth for over a week now. It hasn't been constant pain, but often enough it has brought a blinding flash of pain that, for a moment or two, stops all rational thoughts of anything else in their tracks. I called my dentist last week for an appointment knowing that once a tooth begins to make itself known, it's only going to get worse. Yesterday was the first appointment they could give me.

Unable to identify exactly which tooth was causing the pain for my dentist, caused him to tell me which one is at fault. According to him, it is the last molar on the bottom right. A 40 year old filling cracked and he said that was allowing liquids to get down into the tooth....which is dead...EXCEPT for about half of one root, which is where the pain is coming from.

I need a root canal, but it's going to be a production because of the location of the tooth and will take nearly an hour. He didn't have time to do it yesterday, so he drilled a bit of a hole in the tooth, poked down into to the live root (to make sure that was causing pain...it was), and put a temporary filling on top. He said that would keep me from having pain until I go back on Thursday.

The shot he gave to numb the right side of my mouth before doing all that was apparently the most potent one I've ever had. I've never had one that numbed my face so completely, not even when I had a tooth pulled. Even my tongue was numb. Well, half of it...it was split right down the middle, half numb, half not. Talk about a weird feeling. Plus, any time he's numbed me before for root canals or extractions or whatever, it's always worn off in a couple of hours. Yesterday I was still totally numb at 5:00. I was getting worried and thinking of calling his emergency number, but at 5:30 it just stopped being numb. There was no gradual wearing off. It was just gone.

And the pain was back. It hurt a lot at first, but eventually subsided to a dull ache that has been continuous. So, either the tooth he worked on isn't the problem...or it's worse than he thinks...or there's more than one tooth involved. I guess we'll find out Thursday.

Anyway, frustrating as it is, I am very glad we have dental insurance so I can get the work done. I know far too many people who suffer through severe pain for as long as they can and then end up having the tooth pulled because that's hundreds of dollars cheaper than fixing it. Dental care has become something that isn't terribly common among the working middle class because of cost. We've been in that boat before. It sucks, but when it's $250 to pull the tooth vs. $1200 or more to save the tooth....you do what you have to do.

Way to go politicians and lawyers for creating a medical system that is so ridiculously expensive that many hard-working people can't afford needed care.

Done ranting....and still very happy to have insurance.