Today was the day I was going to get The Thing done. I woke up bright and early and headed to the dentist. To get The Thing done. I thought it'd take a couple of hours. He'd prep my teeth, make impressions, and give me a temporary crown, then in a couple of weeks, I'd go back and get my permanent crowns. It didn't turn out that way.
As soon as he saw my X-rays, he said, "Nope. Not going to happen." He said that because most of those two teeth were actually filling material, if he did put crowns on them, they'd just break off within a year or two. He said what he'd have to do is to tie the crowns to the teeth on either side of the two, thus a minimum of four crowns.
Then he started showing me my X-rays. I've always had soft teeth. I brush and floss religiously, but still have cavities in nearly every one of my teeth...well, not nearly. I've got cavities in every one of my teeth. He showed me my teeth, saying things like, "This one has a huge filling. This one is nearly half filling material" and so on. He said it would be the better option in the long run to just go ahead and put crowns on all my top front teeth.
The third option would be to pull the broken tooth and get a partial. That would have been my choice, but as I said, dentists really, really don't like pulling teeth. He nixed that option pretty quickly. After some discussion, the option to crown 8 of my front teeth was the one we settled on. He had his finance lady figure out how much it would cost, depending on how much my insurance company pays out, and it was a lot. I mean a lot.
That's what I said when she showed me, "That's a lot." She piped up and said, "We have care credit." Oh, goody!
I filled out the application, and she went and submitted it to whoever they have their financing with. Just a minute or two, she came back and said, "You must have really good credit. I've never seen them approve someone for that much that fast." That taken care of, we set about prepping my teeth for said crowns. This involved removing some of each tooth so that the crowns would fit, making molds and impressions so that the crown maker would know how to make said crowns, and the final step was giving me temp crowns so I don't walk around looking like some sort of vampirical monster for the next three weeks.
He showed me what he makes the temporary crowns out of. It's some sort of soft plastic that looks a lot like playdoh. He puts it on my teeth, shapes it so that it looks like teeth, the puts some sort of UV light on it to harden it. The bad part about this is that it is plastic, so he had to make those crowns a bit thicker than normal crowns would be, so that they're less likely to break. I don't like that. It feels like I have a wad of stuff in my mouth. I keep telling myself it's only for a few weeks. It's not helping.
What is helping is the thought that for the first time in my life, I'll have straight, white teeth. For the first time, I'll think that people will see my smile, and not those crooked teeth sticking out at them. I might even smile more! On the other hand, I'm still an INTJ, so I might not smile at all.
It was noonish by the time I got home from the dentist. I'd planned on getting my front flower bed ready for planting. I got the rest of the border installed, and the sod turned.
That's all I did. It was hot -- too hot for it not even being summer yet!
I was a bit bummed that my border didn't quite reach to the house. There wasn't enough room for another section of the stuff I had. I'll have to figure something out later.
Before I came back into the house, I stepped around the corner and took a picture of my roses.
They are starting to open up.
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