Silver and gold...silver and gold...

Okay, maybe no gold, but silver. Though technically no silver either. I'm getting the last of my silver fillings removed today and a brand new crown put on the tooth. I used to have 10 silver fillings. Can you believe it? More filling than teeth in a few of them. Over the years Dr. Chung has taken them out and replaced them with composite resin fillings. Now Dr. Youngblood is taking the last one because the tooth around it is starting to crack. But this is one of those more filling than tooth ones so a new crown it is.

Which makes me extremely nervous.

As you can tell by the fact that I had 10 silver fillings at one point in time, I've had a lot of dental work done. A lot when I was very young. This filling, for instance, I've had since I was a kid. Most of the fillings in my mouth were from when I was a kid. I don't want to say that the dentist we had for awhile was unethical but it seems odd to me that my teeth were just super rotten up until around the age of 11 or 12 and then they were fine. Which also corresponded to when we switched dentists. The major work I've had done over the years has been taking those old fillings out and replacing them with new. Which has sucked. I have a whole section on the right side of my mouth that was filled, then taken out, then refilled, then take out. Then a crown, then taken off, then a root canal and then another crown. Awful.

And this was after the first go round of taking out a failing filling and Dr. Chung discovering that my trigeminal nerve is flipped. A very rare occurrence but really awful when you are doing dental work and can't figure out why your patient won't go numb. This was a big part of my fear of dental work. I knew if I was going to get a filling it was going to hurt, no matter what. No matter how many shots they gave once they started drilling I would feel it. And so for years if I was getting work done I just sucked it up. Just do it and do it quickly.

This tooth is on the other side of my mouth so I am hopeful that it numbs quickly with no issue. I'm also hopeful that the crown is all that's needed and we won't have to go through months of back to the dentist visits and then ending in a root canal anyway.

Hopeful, but really nervous.

Which is why I'm writing this blog.

Because I keep thinking about it and it's making me crazy.

Half an hour until the appointment.  Sweaty palms. Butterflies in my stomach.

*sigh*

Okay, well, this helped.

And by helped I mean not at all.

But thanks for listening to me whine.

Silver and gold...silver and gold...