Because I know you all can’t get enough of my dental escapades, I’m making sure to give you an update. I’ll change up the format to make it seem different and exciting. Highlights:

Yesterday I was in the chair for over four hours. This included more of the same impressions prep, including the lower right molars for the fifth time, at which point my dentist had to leave and announced I needed electrosurgery to make it work and we’d do it next week.

The assistant then took two hours to put my fourteen temporary plastic teeth back on my exposed stubs. The top ones had never been numbed and the follies took so long that the bottom ones all awakened from their anesthetic buzz (which never took all the way in the first place), resulting in a very painful and sensitive experience. Each time the teeth didn’t fit they had to be pried off and the excess cement had to be scraped away to start again.

Now I have blisters between my gums and cheeks, tenderness along the tissues at the teeth where I was all scraped and bloody yesterday, and general jaw pain from holding my mouth open for four hours.

Last week I discovered my dental insurance is changing from no limit (hello $30k restoration) to two grand a year, from 80% coverage to 50% on all this restorative stuff, and from pick-yer-dentist to a network which does not include the one who is doing all this work.

I finally tracked down why I haven’t been reimbursed the $1200 I thought I was owed from flexible benefits (that magical tax shelter for medical procedures paid out of pocket). After a tricky conversation with the cranky lady at Anthem, I found out insurance pays just dandy for veneers, but alas, they are considered cosmetic surgery by flexible benefits (IRS I think?) and so sorry, you can’t have that tax-deferred. Uh, how often does insurance cover cosmetic surgery, especially when the government says they shouldn’t? Note I’m not complaining that loudly in case the insurance folks change their minds.

Have I mentioned this is not cosmetic? Good grief, I don’t even comb my hair. I don’t think anyone could make the case that I care enough about my teeth to spend thirty thousand dollars on them to make them pretty. They looked fine before all this!

One piece of good news: I found out Tuesday that I still have two original teeth in my head! I thought they’d all gone the way of the crown. That’s a couple grand saved!