Oh Holy Crap...

So I had a dentist appointment today. See, the night I went out with my new boss, the incomprable C, and Ferret Trimmin' Girl, I thought I felt a little twinge, and when I got home I mistook my metal filling for a ginormous cavity.

Since I have dental insurance now, I thought it only good that I call and get the thing fixed, especially because it was a bit annoying, and the last time I let a cavity go? I bit into a cinnamon raisin bagel, cracked my molar in half, ended up having that molar and 2 wisdom teeth removed, and got into a horrendous insurance fight over the whole shootin' match with Aetna. So now? Cavities I don't ignore.

But the rest of my dental health? Welllll not so much.

I knew it had been a while since I'd seen Dr. D. I had no idea that it had been in the '90s. Holy crap. So I had to do the whole round of x rays (enough to render me sterile, yay!) and periodontal disease poking. Lets back up to the x-rays for a minute. I think next time I have them done, I'm asking for kid's sized plate holders, because despite what you may have heard/seen/read in the men's room, I really do have a small mouth*. (Shut UP!) And the bite plates they had (all 7,492 of them) in my mouth were sized for Andre the fucking Giant.

The good news? I don't have a cavity, part of my filling broke off.

The bad news? I've got some hella angry gums and some serious tartar buildup on the backs of my teeth.

The upside to that? I'll be taking a half day from work and getting a debridement (which sounds positively cheery, let me tell you) next week, (and then going Christmas shopping) and a cleaning/filling repair a few weeks after that. All told it's not as bad as I had feared.

Of course it could just be a hoax perpetrated by my dentist to pay for the new flat-screen TVs and schmancy technology he bought when he switched offices. They've got the cameras, and the pointers, and the multi-media extravaganza (but I could have done without the Fox News stream as they were poking...) and who's to say they don't just substitute a picture of someone else's scary-assed teeth and call them yours in order to scare you into stuff like "root planing" and "tooth scraping" and "brushing your teeth more often than once a week"**

And my dentist has assured me that his hygenist is not a direct descendant of the Marquis de Sade or Atilla the Hun.


*It's purty, too.
**OK, I do brush pretty regularly, but flossing? Not so much.