Hesitant, Hopeful

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 34. Today, I went to the dentist and found out I'm going to lose a tooth, need fillings in at least three others, and will need a debridement. Then, when that's all done, I get to go for a new patient check-up and see what else needs doing. Then, I get to wait six or so months and get a bridge. Yeah and the most awesome part? Just the initial work that I'll have done on August 14th is going to cost me about $1,700. That doesn't include all that might come after, nor does it include the bridge. I just love getting news like that!

On the upside, I have dental insurance now. The downside of that is that there're no dentists in town that're in "in network" for our plan. The other downside is that our plan only pays $1,000 a year. Awesome. So, since our dentist is out of network, and I refuse to drive an hour to find one that is, our insurance won't pay upfront for their portion. The dentists office files a claim, Delta decides what they will pay, and they cut a check to us since we had to pay upfront.

The only good thing about today's appointment was that now I know what I'll need done and what it'll cost, at least initially. I also got antibiotics and painkillers (yay, hydrocodone, boo that it makes me crazy nauseous). Of course, the pharmacist says that the amoxicillin will reduce the effectiveness of "the pill," which is something I knew but it made me groan anyway. Matt'll just looooooooooooove that. Whatever, he can cope.

What really sucked, though, was all this tooth pain really ruined my birthday. The stuff surrounding my birthday was nice. I got nice gifts and lots of nice well-wishes on Facebook, but I couldn't have birthday cake (because anything resembling sugar makes my teeth go crazy), which really bummed me out. I know it's juvenile, a now-34 year old woman pouting over not having a birthday cake, but it's something I really look forward to. I also had two killer, 8 on a scale of 1-10, toothaches yesterday.

And, the icing on the cake seemed to be that I was really, really depressed yesterday. No one wants to be depressed on their birthday, but with tooth pain, an impending dentists appointment, no birthday cake, and the fact that Matt got up at 2:30pm and went to work at 6:30pm (and two of those four hours he completely ignored me in favor of TV and video games), well, I wasn't feeling all sparkly and happy. But hey, there's always next year and by then I should have all this tooth business straightened out. I hope.