Thursday, April 17, 2008

Dentistry and Earthquakes

I have to have a tooth crowned, one of my molars has fractured beneath the filling along the side of the tooth. I am not handling this well. I scheduled the appointment for next week, but did my usual call-me-if-there's-an-earlier-opening bit with the appointment setter. She did, so I got moved up to today.

I know I should feel lucky. They found it while I have dental insurance, the tooth is salvageable, I don't have any big events or travel coming up that this will interfere with, I've got the money for my co-pay available without a problem, and I don't have an emergency situation here where I've actually cracked a chunk off my tooth. But I just hate the procedures; I had a really, really bad time with my wisdom teeth extraction and I can feel panic rising. My boy's daycare provider said if she had it done, she'd have them do it under general anesthetic - not an option for me since the multi-day hangover/reaction I get from anesthesia is awful.
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Update: I've got the temporary crown on now, after 2 hours in the dentist's chair. Ow. They took out 3/4 of the tooth, left most of the exterior surface but I lost a lot of the interior surface, due to where the crack was. I feel like I'm in mourning for my lost tooth. ETA is the first week of May for the permanent crown. I'm sore, and am taking Ibuprofen to help with that. Also - I remembered to bring my ipod to listen to during the process, but forgot to charge it up beforehand so basically it was just a token comfort item only. They had to stop 2 times during the procedure when I asked them to; also the Novocaine kept wearing off, which is normal for me, so they stopped to reinject me too. The dentist said that happens sometimes with nervous patients; the heartrate increases and adrenaline rush contributes to a faster metabolic rate for processing the Novocaine.

Oh - and on an (hopefully) unrelated note, I experienced my first earthquake today. I woke up thinking that the dogs were bouncing around on the bed, and then noticed the dogs were already on bed next to me and were alert. Also the noisy birdsong of the morning had stopped and it was deathly quiet out - very spooky. Bo was up and noticed some things moving around in the house, e.g. the towels were swaying on the towel bar and the house made a creaky-shuddery noise too. the boys slept through it. The epicenter was over the border in IL about 160 miles away, and was a magnitude 5.4 - from here the USGS estimates the effect would be about a 3. Wild! Ok, you Californians may laugh about this tiny quake if you like. I can't believe you deal with these regularly; they are freaky.

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