I don't know why teh fuck I'm putting this out here other than to maybe teach you about the value of proper tooth care throughout your whole life, but I'm about to tell you what happened to my teeth when I let one orb two cavities turn into, well, something worse.
At least two years ago I knew I had a cavity. That tooth, over the months, slowly grew black and then began to disintegrate. I guess it didn't sound any real alarm bells because, well, I'm sorta going through a "poor phase", and the dentist is expensive, and also because I'm forty two and I figured loosing a tooth wasn't the end of the world. Plenty of people had survived such a thing, right? Only fast forward to about two years later. The original tooth (I don't know the names of teeth) on the middle of my lower right jaw, had broken away completely except for the roots which were still there. The other two teeth going towards the front were also starting to decay, complete with worn away black areas, open holes and so on. Yeah it was pretty bad. Only by now, it hurt bad enough to get my attention, and obviously the decay from the original tooth was spreading to the adjacent ones, one of which was around the front enough to start showing if and when I smiled wide enough. This is not the kind of thing chicks dig. And these days, teeth that are in bad shape also send another signal: that you've maybe had a little brush with a meth habit.
You are not going to get this kind of thing taken care of cheaply. Even if you are as poor as I am, medicaid, at best, if you are on or depending on medicaid, will only pull out teeth. After that you're on your own because they don't give you dentures. Imagine you were disabled or a senior citizen and that was the only way to get something like this dealt with: have any tooth that needs to go pulled, then have no dentures provided to help you chew or keep the surrounding teeth stabilized. You can probably guess how I feel about how I feel about every single last human being on the planet having access to health care regardless of their ability to pay for it, but that's another posting.
Luckily for me, my mom and stepfather said "Look , we'll foot this, just get it the fuck taken care of.". Whew! So I started by making an appointment for a dentist visit. This is like going on a child-rape spree in Mexico, then driving a busload of nuns off some mountain road (also in Mexico), jerking off to their screams as the flames rise, then having to go to confession to atone for all of it. Only the dentists office was the confessional, and Dr. Pullatooth was the priest. Chr*st I was in for it. Luckily the guy didn't run screaming from the room when he had a peek, but the news still wasn't too good: I had five teeth that needed to be dealt with, one of which was an impacted wisdom tooth. At least two of those teeth were going to need surgical extraction. They gave me a written estimate of what this was going to cost and referred me to an oral surgeon. When the dentist is like "Get the fuck out and come back to us after you've got this dealt with by someone else", you know it's serious. The cost altogether was listed at $3k. Yeah, that's $3,000 folks, from having all the teeth taken out that needed to come out to having a passable denture in my mouth to replace them. Well, I am NOT one to pay list price for fucking ANYTHING, and since the oral surgeon was going to be handling the rest of this, I decided to not go back to the dentist. Why? They had also told me what a partial (referred to from now on as a "denture"
which would replace those five teeth would be, and that was something like, well, WAY over $515. I'll get to that $515 number again in a minute.
The reason I wasn't going to get the denture made by those clowns at the dentists office was that they quoted me the price for *their* dentures. I may have fallen for that had I not literally been waltzing by a TV somewhere later that day and seen an ad for affordabledentures.com. Okay well that must mean something, I figured. So I called the good folks at affordabledentutres.com. I knew with a name like that wherever they did their thing was not going to be in the poshest of 'hoods, and it certainly wasn't going to qualify as any kind of "boutique" medical service. But the fuck I was going to pay that total 3K, or, more to the point, make my parents pay it. There are the kind of people who, when they need a new set of tires, will gladly pay over $700 for them. Me, I've never paid more than $100 for a really nice set of mounted, balanced retreads. It just helps to speak some Spanish when you go to the kind of used tire place I like to go to. So when I called affordable dentures, I was conencted to what seemed to be their national call center, which was very helpful in telling me the address of two of their offices in my city, as well as answering all my questions about what they offered and what they charged for it. Lemmee tell you something about dentures which you may not know: when you have teeth removed, you are going to need two sets of dentures. One of them is a temporary and is usually made out of cheaper material than the permanent one. Before, or two week after the teeth come out-you can go get the temporary one made. If you get it made beforehand, that's fine, you just tell them what teeth are coming out, and when they make the denture, they craft it to replace what teeth which they know it will, in the near future, be replacing. 6 months later when your gums have assumed a new shape after everything has healed and so on, then you go in and get the permanent ones made. Some people choose to wear the temporary one for some time rather than go to the expense of the permanent one. But at Affordable Dentures, whatever material you want your denture to be made of or what it costs, the price includes both the temp and the permanent one. Fair enough. I was going to have the denture made up in advance. May as well have it ready to wear as soon as possible after the surgery, even if t was going to be a 2 week wait.
They were also nice and very no-BS about the prices of the 3 kinds of dentures they offered and what they cost, with the price largely dependent on what material they'd be made of. The mostly metal ones were the most expensive. The kind I got/set my sights on/ordered/had made, which were the cheapest, was $515 total. That included both the dentures, plus as many free follow ups as it would take to make them fit juuust right. It's normal for such things, even if very well made, to need a bit of adjusting. Makes sense. Why did I choose the cheapest ones? Well we're back to the thing about the tires, but it was also a matter of them saying that a set of dentures should last about five years, and that's how often hey should be replaced, o I figured why should I order a pair that future civilizations would be able to dig up and put in a museum. The cheaper ones,they said, would also discolor maybe a little sooner than the pricier ones. Again, so what? The frontmost of these artificial teeth was barely going to be visible anyhow. I especially liked that, as I said, they didn't shovel me any BS about trying to bump me into buying the more expensive ones or bully me into making an appointment over the phone. I then called one of their local offices and made an appointment. My dad used to describe bad neighborhoods not by saying "the fucking ghetto", but rather something such as "not where a lot of NPR listeners live" and "Not many national geographic subscribers around here". My own such expression was "Not too far from the city airport". I had no idea where this place was, so when I went there early on the day of my appointment, I just went where the GPS told me. Turns out it was near the airport alright. In fact it was right under the fucking glidepath. The planes were so low when they passed overhead that you got a pretty clear reminder of just how big a 747 with it's landing gear already down really was.
So I go to the oral surgeon and two x-rays later he tells me the same thing as the dentist. Five teeth needed to come out. His price was going to be about what the dentists office told me it was likely to be. One thing people don't do enough in life is just up and fucking ask for a cheaper price for something they want. Like the stuff on the end caps at the end fo the aisles at wal-mart or k-mart? That's where they put stuff they're trying to get rid of and it's usually marked down, but if you're nice and ask the manager to reduce the price even more if you buy two of them, you'd be amazed at how often they'll knock some of the cost down for you. At that point the store is at the point where they're losing money on that stuff anyhow and they just want it gone. The same way I wanted those teeth gone. So I said something about my no-insurance situation and he was willing to accomodate me by charging me only for a routine extraction rather than a mix of routine extractions with two surgeries. See? You just ask nice.
\
I am admittedly one of these fucks who freaks out in the chair. I have to hold back a panic attack every time they reach into my mouth with anything made of metal. There was no way they were going to be able to get this done without me freaking out and/or attacking the doc if I so much as tried to prove something by trying this without being sedated. The doc said I woudl be prescribed 10 mg of valium which I could take about half an hour before I came in, and emphasized I'd need a ride to and from The Inquisi...I mean, the "appointment". You've got to be kinda goofed up to e a dentist, don't you think? He also threw in that they'd have 10 mg more valium and some gas ready if I needed it. I said, truthfully, that I had been given halcion last time I had a tooth pulled and it worked just great. So great that I barely even remembered being at the office that day. Two hours later I was back to my chipper self and back to work like none of it had even happened. Halcion is that good. It's a *hypnotic* drug. So I asked if I could have that instead and he said fine and gave me a scrip for it, to be taken 30 min before the appointment. This drug has got to be comparable to at least two other date rape drugs out there. In fact next to roofies, it probably IS a date-rape drug. I could have been buttfucked by a biker gang and not even put up a token struggle last time I had it and probably wouldn't have even suspected anything unless I woke up in a ditch behind some k-mrt with my pants down around my ankles. Anyways, by now I had brought the price of a supposed $3k procedure down to a mere $1500. Bastards thought they could fuck me, did they? But I didn't get it any lower than that so that's what I (okay, they) paid in the end....$1500.
The next item on the agenda was to go to this denture place and get a mold made of my teeth so they could make the temporary partial. Stay tuned, we'll get to that tomorrow, which, as you'll see, is when the fun REALLY begins.
At least two years ago I knew I had a cavity. That tooth, over the months, slowly grew black and then began to disintegrate. I guess it didn't sound any real alarm bells because, well, I'm sorta going through a "poor phase", and the dentist is expensive, and also because I'm forty two and I figured loosing a tooth wasn't the end of the world. Plenty of people had survived such a thing, right? Only fast forward to about two years later. The original tooth (I don't know the names of teeth) on the middle of my lower right jaw, had broken away completely except for the roots which were still there. The other two teeth going towards the front were also starting to decay, complete with worn away black areas, open holes and so on. Yeah it was pretty bad. Only by now, it hurt bad enough to get my attention, and obviously the decay from the original tooth was spreading to the adjacent ones, one of which was around the front enough to start showing if and when I smiled wide enough. This is not the kind of thing chicks dig. And these days, teeth that are in bad shape also send another signal: that you've maybe had a little brush with a meth habit.
You are not going to get this kind of thing taken care of cheaply. Even if you are as poor as I am, medicaid, at best, if you are on or depending on medicaid, will only pull out teeth. After that you're on your own because they don't give you dentures. Imagine you were disabled or a senior citizen and that was the only way to get something like this dealt with: have any tooth that needs to go pulled, then have no dentures provided to help you chew or keep the surrounding teeth stabilized. You can probably guess how I feel about how I feel about every single last human being on the planet having access to health care regardless of their ability to pay for it, but that's another posting.
Luckily for me, my mom and stepfather said "Look , we'll foot this, just get it the fuck taken care of.". Whew! So I started by making an appointment for a dentist visit. This is like going on a child-rape spree in Mexico, then driving a busload of nuns off some mountain road (also in Mexico), jerking off to their screams as the flames rise, then having to go to confession to atone for all of it. Only the dentists office was the confessional, and Dr. Pullatooth was the priest. Chr*st I was in for it. Luckily the guy didn't run screaming from the room when he had a peek, but the news still wasn't too good: I had five teeth that needed to be dealt with, one of which was an impacted wisdom tooth. At least two of those teeth were going to need surgical extraction. They gave me a written estimate of what this was going to cost and referred me to an oral surgeon. When the dentist is like "Get the fuck out and come back to us after you've got this dealt with by someone else", you know it's serious. The cost altogether was listed at $3k. Yeah, that's $3,000 folks, from having all the teeth taken out that needed to come out to having a passable denture in my mouth to replace them. Well, I am NOT one to pay list price for fucking ANYTHING, and since the oral surgeon was going to be handling the rest of this, I decided to not go back to the dentist. Why? They had also told me what a partial (referred to from now on as a "denture"
The reason I wasn't going to get the denture made by those clowns at the dentists office was that they quoted me the price for *their* dentures. I may have fallen for that had I not literally been waltzing by a TV somewhere later that day and seen an ad for affordabledentures.com. Okay well that must mean something, I figured. So I called the good folks at affordabledentutres.com. I knew with a name like that wherever they did their thing was not going to be in the poshest of 'hoods, and it certainly wasn't going to qualify as any kind of "boutique" medical service. But the fuck I was going to pay that total 3K, or, more to the point, make my parents pay it. There are the kind of people who, when they need a new set of tires, will gladly pay over $700 for them. Me, I've never paid more than $100 for a really nice set of mounted, balanced retreads. It just helps to speak some Spanish when you go to the kind of used tire place I like to go to. So when I called affordable dentures, I was conencted to what seemed to be their national call center, which was very helpful in telling me the address of two of their offices in my city, as well as answering all my questions about what they offered and what they charged for it. Lemmee tell you something about dentures which you may not know: when you have teeth removed, you are going to need two sets of dentures. One of them is a temporary and is usually made out of cheaper material than the permanent one. Before, or two week after the teeth come out-you can go get the temporary one made. If you get it made beforehand, that's fine, you just tell them what teeth are coming out, and when they make the denture, they craft it to replace what teeth which they know it will, in the near future, be replacing. 6 months later when your gums have assumed a new shape after everything has healed and so on, then you go in and get the permanent ones made. Some people choose to wear the temporary one for some time rather than go to the expense of the permanent one. But at Affordable Dentures, whatever material you want your denture to be made of or what it costs, the price includes both the temp and the permanent one. Fair enough. I was going to have the denture made up in advance. May as well have it ready to wear as soon as possible after the surgery, even if t was going to be a 2 week wait.
They were also nice and very no-BS about the prices of the 3 kinds of dentures they offered and what they cost, with the price largely dependent on what material they'd be made of. The mostly metal ones were the most expensive. The kind I got/set my sights on/ordered/had made, which were the cheapest, was $515 total. That included both the dentures, plus as many free follow ups as it would take to make them fit juuust right. It's normal for such things, even if very well made, to need a bit of adjusting. Makes sense. Why did I choose the cheapest ones? Well we're back to the thing about the tires, but it was also a matter of them saying that a set of dentures should last about five years, and that's how often hey should be replaced, o I figured why should I order a pair that future civilizations would be able to dig up and put in a museum. The cheaper ones,they said, would also discolor maybe a little sooner than the pricier ones. Again, so what? The frontmost of these artificial teeth was barely going to be visible anyhow. I especially liked that, as I said, they didn't shovel me any BS about trying to bump me into buying the more expensive ones or bully me into making an appointment over the phone. I then called one of their local offices and made an appointment. My dad used to describe bad neighborhoods not by saying "the fucking ghetto", but rather something such as "not where a lot of NPR listeners live" and "Not many national geographic subscribers around here". My own such expression was "Not too far from the city airport". I had no idea where this place was, so when I went there early on the day of my appointment, I just went where the GPS told me. Turns out it was near the airport alright. In fact it was right under the fucking glidepath. The planes were so low when they passed overhead that you got a pretty clear reminder of just how big a 747 with it's landing gear already down really was.
So I go to the oral surgeon and two x-rays later he tells me the same thing as the dentist. Five teeth needed to come out. His price was going to be about what the dentists office told me it was likely to be. One thing people don't do enough in life is just up and fucking ask for a cheaper price for something they want. Like the stuff on the end caps at the end fo the aisles at wal-mart or k-mart? That's where they put stuff they're trying to get rid of and it's usually marked down, but if you're nice and ask the manager to reduce the price even more if you buy two of them, you'd be amazed at how often they'll knock some of the cost down for you. At that point the store is at the point where they're losing money on that stuff anyhow and they just want it gone. The same way I wanted those teeth gone. So I said something about my no-insurance situation and he was willing to accomodate me by charging me only for a routine extraction rather than a mix of routine extractions with two surgeries. See? You just ask nice.
\
I am admittedly one of these fucks who freaks out in the chair. I have to hold back a panic attack every time they reach into my mouth with anything made of metal. There was no way they were going to be able to get this done without me freaking out and/or attacking the doc if I so much as tried to prove something by trying this without being sedated. The doc said I woudl be prescribed 10 mg of valium which I could take about half an hour before I came in, and emphasized I'd need a ride to and from The Inquisi...I mean, the "appointment". You've got to be kinda goofed up to e a dentist, don't you think? He also threw in that they'd have 10 mg more valium and some gas ready if I needed it. I said, truthfully, that I had been given halcion last time I had a tooth pulled and it worked just great. So great that I barely even remembered being at the office that day. Two hours later I was back to my chipper self and back to work like none of it had even happened. Halcion is that good. It's a *hypnotic* drug. So I asked if I could have that instead and he said fine and gave me a scrip for it, to be taken 30 min before the appointment. This drug has got to be comparable to at least two other date rape drugs out there. In fact next to roofies, it probably IS a date-rape drug. I could have been buttfucked by a biker gang and not even put up a token struggle last time I had it and probably wouldn't have even suspected anything unless I woke up in a ditch behind some k-mrt with my pants down around my ankles. Anyways, by now I had brought the price of a supposed $3k procedure down to a mere $1500. Bastards thought they could fuck me, did they? But I didn't get it any lower than that so that's what I (okay, they) paid in the end....$1500.
The next item on the agenda was to go to this denture place and get a mold made of my teeth so they could make the temporary partial. Stay tuned, we'll get to that tomorrow, which, as you'll see, is when the fun REALLY begins.
