Monday evening I had a very bad headache. It was pretty obvious based on the pattern that had been developing with my toothache that this was caused by my lovely wisdom teeth. That evening I called another dentist in the area for an earlier appointment and canceled my October 18th appointment. I ended up with an appointment with a dentist on Wednesday afternoon to look at my teeth.
The result? The x-ray:
Yep, my wisdom tooth is clobbering a molar and causing trouble. Also, I only have three wisdom teeth, one on the bottom and the two at the top. Apparently this isn’t unusual – some people have none and some have all four. Huh.
So the dentist gave me a referral to an oral surgeon, who I saw yesterday. I learned that all three are impacted and the two top ones absolutely have to come out, one of them hurts and the other had started to come through the gum (so is susceptible to infection). The third is a “full bone impaction” – it hasn’t broken the gum line and is stuck deeper. Of course they want to remove all three while they are in there, to cut down the risk of having to go back and remove them at a later date. I agreed this would be the way to go and they gave me a quote:
1 full bone impactation: $525
2 partial bone impactions: $856
45 minutes anesthesia: $553
Decadron: $72
Total: $2006
Dental insurance: -$1000
My bill: $1006
Teeth are expensive! I’m quite annoyed at the dentist I saw last year who told me that my wisdom teeth were fine, according to the surgeon I saw today there was very little chance they were “fine” last year because of how fully grown in they already are and my testimony that the troublesome one was already poking through the gum at that point. So not only am I now in this position where I need to skip out on work for emergency dental and surgeon visits twice this week and deal with all this pain, I am now covered under insurance that won’t pay more than $1000 in dental services per year! The insurance I had last year was far better. Ugh.
I’ll be scheduling this sometime in the next few weeks. The timing is unfortunate, as Michael and I are going away for our anniversary next weekend and I’d rather not be in pain, but I also don’t want to have wisdom teeth surgery just prior to leaving! So the doctor has me on 600mg of Advil every 8 hours and gave me a prescription for Vicodin should the pain become unmanageable prior to surgery. He also put me on antibiotics to kill an infection that is probably causing most of the pain and advised that I see a dentist for a cleaning ASAP and brush my teeth after every meal, or at the very rinse my mouth out to keep things as clean as possible in there to avoid further infection. Aside from being expensive – teeth are so troublesome!
Ah teeth.