One million days since the last post…

I went to the dentist last week. I had to get a filling. I have to be honest, prior to last May, I had not been to the dentist in about 4 years. My mother would not be proud. Anyhoo, I was having some tooth “issues” (I broke a tooth eating free bread samples at the grocery store), and knew that I needed a check up anyway, so I decided to go to the dentist that my husband goes to. (He has excellent oral hygiene and gets his teeth cleaned every 90 days, I think this is worth mentioning.)

I had never been to a dentist like this before. The office was so nice and luxurious and the staff was so nice and the dentist was super duper nice too. Turns out that I needed a bridge or an implant for the broken tooth, so they scheduled me to come back to get a temporary filling while I decided which option was best for me. So I come back for this filling, they hand me a cd player and headphones and hooked me right up to the nitrous tank. It was like I was in my living room, soooo comfy. Literally, the best dental experience I have ever had, and I have had a LOT of dental experiences. The dentist was so apologetic the entire time, because, hey, I might have been floating on air, but I was still getting an intense filling. I felt like she truly understood that I was uncomfortable, I mean TRULY. So they scheduled another appointment, a “consultation” to determine all the drilling I needed to have done and the priority of each item. They really should have talked to me while I was all high on nitrous because when they said it would be close to $10,000 OUT OF POCKET, I almost fell out of the chair onto the lush, luxurious carpeting. No wonder it’s like a country club in that place, they are charging millions of dollars for the lavish-ness. Not to mention, this particular dentist is not in the network of dentists that “cooperate” with my dental plan. Needless to say, I made an appointment with a random dentist in my network so I don’t have to sell a kidney for the luxury of eating something besides chicken broth for the rest of my life. The filling I got last week cost me $35 instead of $300 and I guess I’ll end up spending about $2000-ish for all the mouth renovations I need. Still sucky, but less sucky than having to sell my house and move into my car. So for $35 I got no cd player and headphones, no fresh-out-of-dental-school-dentist stroking my poor, pitiful ego, and NO NITROUS! This is the stripped down dentistry I’m used to, lots of tugging and pulling and teenaged dental assistants talking about Project Runway, but I gotta tell ya, in that one visit to the special dentist, I got spoiled.

I took a personal day for the filling, by the way.