Fun At The Dentist

So, yesterday morning Keith woke me up at 5am to drive him to work so that I would have the car for my 12:15 dental appointment to have my teeth cleaned first and then have a crown done and a small hole in an old filling drilled and filled. He was doing a dogcatch (where they ride in a van out to a train to relieve a crew) so I figured he would get off work late in the afternoon and hopefully it would all work out time wise and I'd be done with the dentist before he needed a ride home.

I sometimes ride my bike to the dentist, it's not far from the house, maybe a 15 minute bike ride, but it was going to be well into the 90s by noon yesterday and I really didn't want to sit in the dental chair for 2 or 3 hours all sweaty. I do sweat a lot even on a 15 minute bike ride, heck, I sweat a lot doing just about anything during the summer, never mind riding the bike to the dentist.

I get to the dentist at 12:15, and the hygienist is running late, so could I come back at 1 for the crown appointment and then get my teeth cleaned after that? Um, no, let's just make the cleaning appointment for another day. This is the second time my cleaning appointment has been canceled and maybe this hygienist should make more of an effort to get to work on time? I do like her, she is a little more gentle than some hygienists I've had, remembering the one who got a little too enthusiastic about polishing one of my teeth and ended up polishing away part of my gum, leaving it very sore for a few days.

Anyway, I go run an errand and stop back by the house for a few minutes, and now I'm kind of sweaty despite no bike ride because just driving around in the car in the summer and running one errand (stopping into Michaels to get some paper) makes me sweaty. Then, back to the dentist at 1 for my crown.

Into the chair and I get all numbed up and they start drilling and drilling on the tooth that needs to be drilled way down for the crown. It didn't hurt but there sure were a lot of fingers and dental devices in my mouth. After the drilling is done they put this weird thing in your mouth that takes computer pictures of the area where the crown is going to go but if you have any saliva in your mouth it doesn't work all that well, so I think it took about 30 minutes for that to finally be done and the crown could be made in their special crown making machine that they have there. It's really kind of cool how they do it, you can watch the machine from the waiting room if watching crowns being made is something you want to do, and it only takes about 15 minutes for it to be done.

However, just as they were getting ready to make my tooth the computer system went down.

So, about 30 minutes waiting for it to come back up and then the first crown made wasn't quite right so they had to make another one.

While waiting for computers to come back up and the crown to get made, they did the small drilling and filling on my other tooth, which I wish all dental procedures were so easy, that was done in about 5 minutes except for the part where some nasty tasting filling stuff went down my throat and made me start coughing and I had to drink some water to stop coughing.

Finally, though, the crown got put in just as all the novocaine was wearing off and my jaw was starting to get a little achy. I don't wear a watch and don't have a phone in my pocket to tell me what time it is so I was a little surprised to find out that it was 4pm and I'd been sitting there for 3 hours.

Then I get home and see Elizabeth's car in the driveway because Keith had gotten off work at about 2 and had no way to get home and finally called her to see if she could come pick him up. Apparently nobody at work who saw him sitting there thought to offer him a ride home despite them asking why he was sitting there and him telling them that he had no ride home until I got done at the dentist.

At least it all worked out and he got a ride home and my tooth got finished even if I do have to go back in a few weeks to get my teeth cleaned. Hopefully this time the hygienist will get to work on time.

And, we finally got dental coverage through the railroad, you have to wait a year for the dental and vision, but the wait was worth it because the crown was half the cost of the last one that I had and the filling was only twenty bucks.