Pearly Whites

Good Morning -

It should be pretty clear from the look of this Virgen that I went to the dentist yesterday. The above images were all pilfered from the different brochures displayed throughout the exam room, arranged over an image of stalagmites from Kartchner Caverns because I thought that was kind of dental looking in a freakish, sort of funny way.

It's still relatively big news that I went to the dentist because for quite some time I didn't have access to those wielders of sharp, shiny metal picks and mirrors. For the two years that I was in grad school, the $500 per semester the University wanted to charge me was more out of my loans than I was able to contribute, so those were dentistless years. Then, I graduated, found work, got insurance, but then left a few months later, just as the organization was starting to go up in smoke and before I had considered that I should use my insurance while I have it.

My following work as a barista/dish woman extraordinaire came with many benefits, none of which were of the insurance variety. Even after I left the steamed milk for a great contracted position with a government agency with a great supervisor, fantastic pay and interesting work (not that the dish room wasn't endlessly interesting - a sociological dissertation in the waiting), I was sans insurance because I was part-time and contracted.

During that last year of insurancelessness, I knew I had two teeth that needed root canals. One I had known about since before grad school, but the cost - even with insurance - was prohibitive, so I chewed around it. When the other tooth on the other side of my mouth went up (phrasing from my mom's Baltimore people to explain when an appliance breaks), I had no choice but to find a way to get the work done.

I tried for the state insurance, but because my pay at the contracted job was great (but not so great that I could buy my own plan), I didn't qualify for dental. I went to the clinic anyway, hoping to at least get a cleaning and a check-up.

The dentist there informed me that I did in fact need two root canals (not news) and refused to do a cleaning until I had taken care of them. She did inform me during the exam that, because of my bite, my four front bottom teeth have never been used and still had the top ridges they came out with almost 30 years ago. Whether or not that freaky personal tidbit was worth the $100 out-of-pocket office visit, I remain unsure.

After chewing on and then swallowing my pride, I borrowed the money from my partner. I'm sure you can figure out that it costs significantly more to do a root canal than to yank a tooth, so after consultation, elected to root canal one tooth and extract the other. One was a molar between two teeth (root canal) and one was a molar at the end of the line (extract) and I was advised that it's not good to extract a tooth in the middle of the row because then the teeth around it lose support. I'm a big fan of support, so chose to make sure those surrounding teeth got the love they needed.

I couldn't bring myself to borrow the money for the root canal, the extraction, and the crown, and knew that my job search at the time would eventually lead to work with benefits (which was the whole reason I was looking for work - I knew I had to get insurance), so continued to chew around the newly excavated root canal on my upper left and the newly shortened row of molars on my bottom right while I interviewed, applied to different benefits-eligible positions, and worked on paying off the root canal and extraction.

Just before the holidays, I got hired at my current employer. Between the glory of the job search being over and the great benefits package, I needed nothing under the tree or in my stocking to make the magic of the season.

That said, on Christmas, a week before the benefits kicked in with the New Year, I was chewing a handful of nuts and ended up losing part of the root-canaled tooth in the process. I tended to it with gargled salt water over the holiday until offices opened and benefits kicked in. Once we had stepped fully into 2008, I looked through my choices, found a dentist up the street, and made an appointment for that week.

That was my first visit with this dentist. She said she would be able to crown the tooth, even with it's smaller, nut-demolished surface area, but that it would be $570 - with insurance. When I had picked my plan at my new job, I had specifically looked at the comparison charts to see which one offered cheaper crowns and chosen accordingly. It's still hard to believe that a $570 co-pay is the cheapest option with insurance.

Sighing, I explained that it would take me a few months to save up for that, so booked a crowning appointment for later in the Spring. In April, I finally had the crown installed, and booked a cleaning for the very next month. The dentist told me that because it had been a while since I had had a cleaning, they might have to do a deep, deep cleaning that reached further into the gums and my pocketbook. She said they would know once they started but that it would either cost my $10 co-pay or $145. I booked for May and threw up the "no whammies, no whammies, big bucks" intention that it would be the $10 and not the $145 co-pay.

At the appointment in May, the hygienist confirmed that it would be the higher end cleaning, so I broke the work up, getting my x-rays and exam done that day and rescheduling a month later for the cleaning.

That was yesterday and I am happy to report that I now have clean teeth. In case you hold dental hygiene judgment and think that all this work needed is a result of bad care on my part, I'll share that I brush twice a day and floss regularly. My giant financial contributions to dentists throughout the southwest are wholly due to genetics.

Between cavity-prone make-up and poor lay-out that results in overcrowding, I am a dentist's ticket to that Bahama vacation home they've always dreamed of owning. I had a dentist try to talk me into braces when I was 17 so that he could pull my teeth apart a bit, threatening that if I didn't get it done, I wouldn't be able to chew when I was older. "When you're older" is about as impactful a threat to an immortal 17-year old as using the distant threat of lung cancer someday to deter a teen from smoking.

Speaking of smoking, the cleaning I finally had yesterday removed the last of any sort of trace of that from my teeth. I retired from smoking over a year ago, and this cleaning was like the final frontier of a smoke-free body.

Here's to that. Here's to insurance for all. Here's to clean, sparkly, healthy teeth all around. Here's to having the resources to cover one's own co-pay, even if it takes a few months.