Dental Woes and Whatnot

When I was four, I contracted bacterial meningitis. To save my life, I was given some powerful antibiotics that worked, but at the cost of destroying my enamel. This resulted in yellowing teeth and getting cavities and abscesses at the drop of a hat. Not to put too fine a point on it, my teeth look like a meth user's, so my mother and I have been looking into dental implants. I've been appointment-hopping, getting consults, and it turns out I currently have an abscessed molar that needs to be taken care of before I can even begin thinking about consults for implants. Fortunately, it doesn't hurt, probably because there's nothing opposite of it to aggravate it. The molar on the top got abscessed a while before my cancer diagnosis, and that's when I got a few fun facts about me confirmed.

1) My veins are shite. It took seven tries to get an IV working, and all the other attempts resulted in my veins blowing out. As a result, I spent the next couple weeks looking like I'd been battered.

2) Locals do absolutely nothing for me. After they tried - and failed - to get an IV line going for IV sedation, they switched to locals to see if anything would work. I've not had good experience with getting locals to work, and this time was no exception. The first one did work, for all of 10 minutes. The second one just made my face numb, and had the fun perk of worsening the toothache pain to the top of the pain scale. (This crisis was ultimately resolved by admitting me into the hospital and someone there was finally able to get an IV going on me, and I was put under general anesthesia for the extraction)

This means any major dental work done on me has to be done by a place that 1) does adult IV sedation and 2) accepts Medicaid. There's a grand total of one place that fits that bill, the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. I have an appointment for a tooth extraction on the 12th of September, a few weeks before the wedding. And Jen has to drive me home since they're doing IV sedation, and she loathes driving in Omaha, especially in unfamiliar areas. This is going to be exciting.

Also, this is a teaching hospital. I think that's why the medical team was so ridculously excited to learn that I had a medical port to use instead of getting an IV in my arm. I'm sure a lot of that is because it's easier, but I'm not so sure there wasn't an element of "SHINY TECHNOLOGY!" going on there too. Most people coming in for dental work aren't going to have that.

I'm just glad that this tooth hasn't started hurting and even more that it didn't start hurting during chemo, which is hard on the teeth too. It would have been harder to get dental work done while undergoing chemo. There are false teeth of near-denture quality that can be used to give a cosmetic appearance of having nice teeth at a fraction of the cost of dentures, so I'm going to try that out for the wedding pics. You can't eat with them on, and I'm not sure how comfortable they'd be overall, but I've seen good reviews. There's a reason I smile with my mouth closed in pictures. I laugh too much to be able to remember to keep my mouth closed, which is why my mom's helping me get implants, or if I'm not a good candidate, proper dentures. It would be nice to be done with this tooth business.

In the meantime, I have other things in the works. YSC will be featuring me in an article they're going to publish on October 13, the National Breast Cancer Awareness Day. I'll post a link to it when it goes live. I'm also being interviewed by the local newspaper for an article about Wish Upon a Wedding. The journalist doing the story wants to be able to publish it on the Sunday of the wedding, September 28. I'll post a link to that article as well.

Another metster who has a blog of her own is going to be running guest articles for the month of October, and I've submitted an entry of my own to Telling Knots. I plan to try to post every day in the month of October with information about metastatic breast cancer to fight against the pinkwashing of Pinktober. I'm also using a breeding sim site I'm active on (Wajas) as a way to spread awareness. I have two customs with the Metavivor ribbon colors that I've bred for pups that I'll be selling for game-site currency in October, with a big sales post promoting them and featuring information and links about metastatic breast cancer. To help drum up more awareness, people can buy a pup for only 40k, which is stupidly cheap in site currency, to represent the 40,000 people who die each year from metastatic breast cancer if they post in the thread sharing something that they learned about MBC, forcing them to read the information provided, and also if they pledge to spread MBC awareness to counter the pinkwashing.

One of the pups I bred for myself, fairly identical to how her parents look.

I'm not going to be thrown under the bus, or swept under the rug, and forgotten about in the wave of Pink, Hope, and Cure this October. I'm gonna make some noise.