I haven’t gotten Covid yet, at least I can say that. But my medical woes (and bills) are piling up. My arthritic shoulder is still arthritic and likely will be for the rest of my life. It’s all about managing the discomfort now. I take an anti-inflammatory when it real starts to flare up, but I quit doing physical therapy because it’s $70 a session and that adds up very quickly. Plus, I feel as if I can get, like, 75% of the benefit doing the exercises on my own at home. That’s good enough for me. It’s not like I’m an NFL quarterback leading his team to the Super Bowl for the 10th time.* If I have to scale back my activities or skip workouts every now and then, so be it. My life isn’t really going to change if I do a few less burpees than I would with a totally healthy shoulder.
*Hat tip to Tom Brady who is playing in his 10th Super Bowl in a few weeks and is actually a bit older than me. I’ve never been a big Brady fan, and I'll be rooting against him, but it is completely bonkers that he is 43 and still one of the best players in the league. It’s totally unprecedented and legit impressive.
And right now my shoulder is only a secondary medical issue. My primary concern is my mouth. My weird, expensive mouth. I went to the dentist on Monday, because one of my teeth is hurting, and that’s pretty much the only reason I ever go to the dentist, because I have good oral hygiene (floss, brush, Listerine at least twice, usually thrice, a day) and never really need a cleaning or anything like that. That’s the good part of my mouth. The bad part – or, rather, one of the bad parts – is that I cracked a tooth some years ago, causing a lot of discomfort, and I had to get a root canal to fix it, and apparently root canals usually don’t solve the problem forever. The pulp of my tooth is irritated again, so the endodontist has to open it back up, go back in, and clean up/remove the problematic area. I have it scheduled for a few weeks from now. Sounds like fun.
And that’s not the worst of it. While I was at the dentist, she noticed I had some pretty severe lower mandibular absorption (the gums of my lower front teeth are eroding) and referred me to a specialist. So, I saw the periodontist today, and she told me I was in danger of losing my lower front two teeth if we don’t do something to stop the bone loss. (I’ll probably lose them anyway at some point, but there is a big difference, in terms of quality of life, between losing them at 44 and 84.) So, I scheduled a restorative surgery that I know is going to be very painful, because I had the same basic procedure done when I got dental implants 25 years ago. They are going to graft bone from the top of my mouth and sew it on to the area in need. The part that receives the new bone doesn’t actually hurt that much, and if it does, you don’t even notice it, because the “donation” site absolutely kills. Of the massive amount of painful work I’ve had done to my mouth over the years, the thing that sticks out as being the most miserable is getting bone grafted from my palette. It feels like somebody is constantly pouring boil water on that spot.
It’s going to be painful on the wallet too. Insurance is only going to cover so much; I’m going to be paying thousands of dollars out of pocket. I’m sure it’s way overpriced too. I bet I could get the same procedure done in a different country for a tiny sliver of what it will cost here -- but what can I do?* I’m not going to single-handedly change our fucked up, price-gouging system in time for my appointment next month, and as it so happens, keeping my teeth in my head is a high priority for me at the moment. I’ll just bite the bullet and pay it.
*Also, I’m reminded of S’s cousin who flew to India to get a dental implant, because it’s so much cheaper there, and then the implant fell out after she returned.
The truth is, S and I have been very fortunate to keep our jobs throughout this pandemic, and I feel lucky we can afford this at all. If we were living paycheck to paycheck, I likely would not even do it and just take my chances. Instead, I’ll dip into some money we set aside to get solar panels to pay for it. Sorry environment. This is a good example of why affordable healthcare is such an important issue. It has massive knock-on effects in other areas.
So, that’s that. There is a question of why – why is my bone eroding? But I’ll probably never get a satisfactory answer to that. I asked the periodontist, and she offered some reasons, but it was pretty clear she didn’t really know. Like I said, I just have a weird mouth. I have two dental implants because a baby tooth never came out, and the adult tooth, with no place to go, impacted sidewise, knocking out the roots of two neighboring teeth, effectively killing them. Why didn’t my baby tooth come out? Don’t know. Why didn’t my adult tooth harmlessly protrude above my baby tooth, like it usually does when a baby tooth doesn’t come out? Again, don’t know. Shit happens, I guess.
I suppose it could be worse. George Washington had hippopotamus teeth. (Or is that a myth? Nope, it’s true, and it sounds pretty awful.) And outwardly, my teeth still look fine -- straight and clean. I mean, they had better look fine, if you add up all the work I’ve had done on them over the years, I probably have a $50,000 smile.
By the way, one thing I noticed is that the dentist, the endodontist, and the periodontist are all women. I’m all for equal representation, but I’d just as soon it be some other dude who has to visit all of them the same week.
Until next time…
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