Painless Dentist

19 - 31 March 2019

After an early dinner in Prescott I finally made it back to the valley. We started to make final preparations to head back east again. We had only planned on being gone two or three weeks, and we were approaching the high end of that range already. One of the last things on my list was to finally straighten out Heather's insurance with my dentist.

I went into their office with the laptop so I could show them various forms and answer their questions  in real time. We finally got the dentist and Heather's insurance on the same page, so I tried to schedule a checkup for appointment day, which everyone knows is the Monday before Thanksgiving. They said hmm, we have a cancellation, what about this Thursday? That could work!

This was my first dentist appointment in 18 months, where I had being going every four. I didn't win the teeth lottery like Heather, but with that schedule I had been pretty good for years. Two hours before my appointment I'm brushing my teeth and a filling falls out. I went in for my appointment and they took a look and a zillion xrays. Suddenly we had another change in plans, with a flurry of last minute appointments around cancellations and other small windows in their schedule. We went to Chris's for a couple days, then back for the first crown on Monday.

We were on our way back to the valley on I10 and stopped at the McDs in Lordsburg as we commonly do. As we got back on the interstate heading west the traffic almost immediately slowed, then stopped. We crept up to the next exit and I decided to get off, bypassing Tucson for the Globe route. As we drove away we could see the line of cars and trucks pointed toward a fire in the distance. Later we found out there was a wreck several miles ahead, two semis and pickup. Two folks were airlifted out, including one teenage boy, three dead. Give those semis lots of room. They can take almost twice as far to stop as a car, and may weigh in at 40 tons. On the boat they call it the law of gross tonnage. It doesn't matter if you have the right of way; you're going to lose.

They did one crown and a double gum scrape session on half my mouth in one afternoon. It was just as fun as it sounds. The second crown was scheduled for Friday, with them trying to fit in two more gum scrape sessions during the week. I finally got one on Thursday, and another just before my second crown on Friday.

I was successful with those appointments even if they weren't fun, but the last quadrant gum scrape was just before my second crown, which was supposed to be on a wisdom tooth. Suddenly there were lots of hmming and offline conversations. As it turns out, on top of the crack in the wisdom tooth (which they thought was manageable) the number of fillings on that wisdom tooth had somewhat hidden the extent of damage. More importantly where, which was down at and proceeding slightly under the gumline at the very back of the tooth, right up against my jaw. The dentist now advised just pulling the wisdom tooth, but the oral surgeon didn't rotate through until early the next week. I got an appointment for the following Tuesday.

Back to LC we go for a quick weekend. I got the oil changed, since we had somehow put on over 8,000 miles since Xmas, and we actually got to the gym.

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