hello again, doctor dentist

Be warned, dear reader, this will be a rambling post about dentistry. And life lessons.

Remember the long and costly story about my stress-related root canal some years back (before I got to be a happy business owner of course)? 

And then a few months later I lost an old filling, but instead of going back to my old, reliable dentist who is situated on the other side of the city which takes me 1,5-2 hours one way trip, I decided to try the nearby general denistry? 

Which turned out to be a bad decision because she turned out to be quite a bit of a cipher who didn't do a good job. And was pretty unfriendly while doing it.

A few months later that darn new filling, given the crap dentistry, fell out and last summer most of the tooth with every bit of old filling finally crumbled. So I knew I had to make a new dentist appointment, at my old, reliable dentist. And then last autumn I felt there must be a non-visible cavity in a tooth in my upper jaw (just above the root canal-tooh of 2011), because on and off I could feel a bit of pain there.

Admittedly I have been putting this making a dentist appointment call off, for various reasons. And when I finally called I couldn't get an appointment until now.

But it felt good to come back to a friendly professional face. I haven't been to a dentist in couple of years now - I've always gone once a year for a check up - so who knew how bad it could be, even if I'm really careful with my dental hygiene? The good news are that the only two things he noticed were the two things I've already figured out. The rest of the dental status looked fine.

The bad news are that they BOTH possibly need root canals. Ah life. 

The dentist said I must have had a tooth ache in that lost filling-tooth at some time, which I firmly denied. Looking back at my old blog post now I realise I actually did, back in August 2012. But as that was the infamous blah, snivel nose and health year of conundrum I must have forgotten all about it. And the tooth hasn't been acting up since. It still isn't, but it's of course a nuisance that it's not much of a tooth left there. And I do use up a lot of dental floss. 

Hopefully he will be able to recreate a tooth on top of the old one instead. Given that the root isn't too bad. Fingers crossed.

Same thing with the upper jaw tooth cavity, if the hole isn't as deep as he suspects and the dental pulp isn't in danger of becoming infected - fingers crossed again add touch wood - he can fix it without root canal. And really, having to go through that procedure in the upper jaw too doesn't exactly fill me with ecstatic feelings of joy.

I got my next (slightly dreaded) appointment on Februaty 1st, great way to kick-off a new month, right? Right.

So what lessons have I learnt from this?

A) Always visit a dentist (or other health professional for that matter) you know and trust.

B) Do visit the dentist for a check-up each year, that way you will usually be able to prevent things from becoming full-blown nastiness.