Betsy Bailey

While on the topic of teeth and how expensive they can be…

Human teeth need to evolve such that they are better suited to modern longevity. Having a baby and turning 40 within a year of each other have been hell on my teeth.

Recently I’ve had THREE pulp caps. That’s where there is so much decay that they have to drill very close to the pulp, so they put on this antibiotic layer to try and preserve the pulp while the dentin layer grows back up. It’s a conservative treatment designed to prevent a root canal. It’s also another layer of treatment your dentist gets paid for if the pulp cap fails and you still need a root canal. (Although in fairness, my dentist said that if the pulp cap fails he will apply the very high cost of the porcelain onlay towards the cost of the crown that would become necessary.)

Anyway, one of those teeth already required a crown (one of my metal fillings failed and cracked the tooth massively). Another one required an onlay. And the other one “just” a filling (not metal!!).

Besides all that, I also had to have the crown replaced on a tooth that had been root canaled not even 8 years ago – the dentist I had then apparently did a shoddy job; decay was getting under it because it wasn’t properly under my gums. (I’ll always remember the day I got that permanent crown placed, because it was 9/11 and I was driving to my appointment after both towers had fallen. It felt very surreal to go about such a mundane activity in the midst of such dramatic events.)

The dental work itself was basically painless. Just long, tedious and uncomfortable. The one good thing about a root canal is that the nerve is gone, so there is exactly zero pain to worry about once it’s done and the anesthesia wears off. One of the teeth I got pulp capped can hurt pretty badly from time to time if I chew too “aggressively?” or whatever on that tooth. It’s vulnerable for the next few months while we see if the the dentin grows back to the point that the tooth is considered salvaged. Otherwise, moving on to a root canal for that tooth, too. In the meantime, advil is my friend. Ugh.

My dental work was so expensive we had to divide it into two sessions. Two teeth in December maxed out my dental benefit. So we did the other two teeth a couple weeks ago when the benefit renewed for the calendar year. And we still owed nearly $2,000 out of pocket.

As if that’s not enough, having had one metal filling fail pretty catastrophically (a common scenario because of hot/cold expansion/contraction), I’m now motivated to get the other metal fillings I have replaced. I’ll probably have 1-2 done at a time at future cleanings and take care of the problem gradually. Ugh. Ugh, I say.

In hindsight, what I would do differently:

1. Get x-rays immediately before getting pregnant (a hard one to accomplish, since a girl only has so much control over that). But still, I could have made more effort. We moved right before I got pregnant and I procrastinating on finding yet another new dentist.
2. Get x-rays *immediately* after the baby is born. I kept procrastinating for almost 18 months. Had we caught the decay earlier, the intervention likely wouldn’t have been as dramatic and costly. As it was, I only went in when I started having some tooth pain. When you feel tooth pain, things are usually pretty far gone at that point.