Tooth
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Teeth And Flouride

I have had the final stage of the root canal work done on my tooth and the dentist said I also need a cap for it.  It has cost me over 800 dollars to get this single tooth fixed and now they are saying I need to spend another 1,100.00 to protect it because it is almost all filling and fillings fall out.

Has the world gone mad?  Almost two thousand dollars for ONE tooth?  I couldn’t afford the 800 let alone another grand!  I will have to chew on the other side of my mouth to protect the darn thing now and that really makes getting it fixed a bit pointless!

For 800 dollars I want the damn thing to last forever!  If they dig up my body a hundred years after I die I want that tooth to still be in my mouth!  At these prices it may be the only tooth left but I plan to haunt the descendants of that dentist if it is not there!

I got the better of the last dentist I saw though.  One of my front teeth was all filling wrapped around a steel pin inserted into the stump of the tooth.  When it got wobbly I went and saw a dentist.  I wanted him to stop it from wobbling.

He looked at it and, before I could blink, he pulled the whole tooth out!  I was outraged but he said the tooth stump had cracked and he could not put another pin in.  I’m sure he could have done it somehow – glued it in or something but no – he ripped it out and left me with a big gap in my smile.

I glared at him as fiercely as I dared given the instruments he was holding.

“What happens.s.s now?” I whistled through the newly created gap.

He said I had several options.  I could learn to love my whistle and the gap in my smile or I could have it fixed.  The options for fixing it included inserting a pin in my jawbone and building a false tooth around it, a removable false tooth, or a bridge.

The permanent false tooth was going to cost a couple of thousand dollars which I did not have!  The removable false tooth would take some time to create and I would have to endure the gap in my smile until it was made for me so that left the bridge.

The dentist said the bridge would cost almost a thousand dollars but it would be done in two stages.  Stage one involved putting in a temporary bridge and waiting until the hole in my gum healed then putting in a permanent bridge.

It cost me 300 dollars for the temporary bridge but I left the surgery without a whistle and my smile looked fine.  I was scheduled to return a couple of weeks later and told to go easy on the bridge in the meantime.

I decided I wanted more than a couple of weeks use out of this 300 dollar job so I cancelled the next visit and decided to make do with the temporary bridge for a while.  I am careful not to put too much stress on the bridge and, so far, I have had seven years worth of use out of it!

I plan to wait until it breaks before I spend any more on it but every time I see a dentist now I worry that they will “accidentally” break it.

Every time I have to go to the dentist I think about having all my teeth removed and getting false ones just to be done with it.  It’s just so expensive trying to keep them!

When I was a little girl it seemed like EVERY adult had false teeth and, for some strange reason, they all liked to do tricks with them or take them out and “surprise” me with them.

When I was in primary school all the children were given a small bottle of milk at school each day.  Every Friday we were given a flouride tablet and, as compensation, a small bottle of either chocolate or strawberry flavoured milk.  The schools were trying to fight tooth decay in children by supplying these things.  I loved the milk and flouride tablets but one of my friends hated them.  She always gave hers to me and only drank her milk on Fridays.

She had a full set of false teeth by the time we turned 18 and she wasn’t the only one.  I noticed two other friends of mine had false teeth before they were 20 too and both of them were rarely in school so they would not have gotten the milk or tablets either.

By the time I went to high school flouride had been added to our water supply so schools no longer gave children milk or tablets.

I have read that there is a lot of concern about flouride and people are fighting to have it removed from our water supply.  I don’t have any concerns.  I have been consuming it every day of my life since primary school and it does not appear to have done me any harm at all.

I’m living proof flouride works.  I am 50 years old and I still have most of my teeth.  Most of my top teeth and all of my molars have fillings but there has never been a single cavity in any of my 10 front lower teeth!  This is more amazing than it may sound because I was not taught to brush my teeth each day so they have been badly neglected over the years.  They are also unusually sharp according to a dentist which means they should not be as strong as they are.

The other day I saw a small item in a newspaper about the rising incidence of tooth decay in children.  The paper said it was due to junk food and sugar but I don’t believe that.  I’m the junk food and sugar queen!  I lived on junk food and sugary drinks all my life!  I have no doubt most of my cavities came from them but those cavities did not begin to appear until AFTER my teeth were weakened by giving birth.

(Ask any doctor – childbirth is bad for your teeth and bones if you are not careful and I was not careful.)

I think the rising incidence of tooth decay in children is because everyone drinks bottled water now so children are not getting flouride from tap water any more.

You know what REALLY annoys me about this?

Older people with false teeth tormented me all through my childhood with their tricks and denture flashing.  Now it looks like I will be suffering the same torment in my old age as the kids of today get their false teeth and start flashing them at me in years to come!

I think I will spend the money to keep my own teeth after all.  That way I will be able to bite them if they try it!

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