It's almost done!

Last week I made an alarmingly large payment to my dentists office. While I know we will be getting reimbursed for half of it, I am not in the habit of dropping payments in excess of 4500.00, especially on a debit card…but it was planned for and expected.

While watching that money disappear from my bank account didn’t exactly make me want to dance a jig, the reason for it did.

On Friday I will am going in for yet another sedation dental appointment. This visit marks the end of my serious treatments. The end of my dental nightmare that has spanned the length of ten plus years. The end of a seemingly financial black hole that has easily sucked out over 20,000 dollars out of my wallet over the course of all those years.

You can only imagine my excitement to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel on this.

As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, I only have myself to blame for all of this. I would love to blame genetics but despite the fact that my parents didn’t have the best teeth, (my dad had dentures for as long as I could remember and my mom has always had very small, very weak teeth) my brother and I managed to luck out with some pretty strong teeth. Crooked, very much so, but we had some strong, thick teeth.

No, my dental nightmare began when I though it would be a wise idea to stick my finger down my throat and throw up every single morsel that I ate.

I won’t bore you with the details on that whole fiasco but let’s just say after a few years of this, the enamel on my teeth was pretty much non existent. Despite my brushing after every barfing session, my teeth began their downward spiral.

I’m happy to say that I have fully recovered from the bulimia but the rotting of my teeth has haunted me ever since. Couple that with an intense fear of the dentist after a REALLY horrific root canal that ended in an extraction, and it didn’t take my mouth long to turn into a pretty big mess.

When I lived in Phoenix,it was getting to the point where I had some really bad infections. I knew that they couldn’t do any work on my teeth if they were infected so I would make a worry free visit to have them give me an evaluation, knowing they wouldn’t be poking around in there. They would quote me a price, give me some anti-biotics and I would be on my happy way. Once the infection cleared up I wasn’t in *so much* pain so I never made the follow up appointment to get the work done. Once the infection came back I would do the same thing over again…and so on and so forth.

Once we moved out to California I had to do something. I can’t remember if it was a tooth infection or perhaps a crown that had come off but something had forced me to find a dentist out here.

Thankfully the first place I visited, I fell in love with. They claimed to specialize in “scaredy cats” and introduced me to the wonderful thing that is sedation dentistry.

This will be my fifth and hopefully final sedation dentistry. Each visit has cost me thousands of dollars and has totally been worth it!! I basically take a little nap and when I wake up the dental work is done. It’s sore but I don’t remember a thing of the visit! This was the stuff I had needed all along!

I can’t even express the difference in my teeth since I first started seeing this dentist. I went from constantly being in pain, always having swollen glands in my neck due to infections…now nothing! I honestly thought I would have to live in pain for the rest of my life or get my teeth all extracted because I had let the damage go so far.

After I made the payment over the phone, I called my friend Paula and told her the insane amount of money I had just spent in the course of five seconds. She told me that I was very lucky that my husband was supportive of this. She said a lot of guys wouldn’t have been. I agreed but pointed out that he had seen me in so much pain for so long…he had seen me have to use a mouth guard to eat my dinner because my bottom teeth were so rotten that if I didn’t I would be in severe pain. But I am lucky that has been so supportive and willing to use “our” money to get this all taken care of.

So on after Friday, my dental transformation will be completed. I’m over the moon with happiness!