King Kevin

[kevin_standlee]

...because I'm now crowned. Twice (rearmost two lower right teeth), plus the one I already have. And another in the pipeline, as my dentist looked at the chipped tooth and said it's going to need a crown, too, although if it doesn't get any worse, maybe we can hold off until January. I really need to do that unless there's a major failure, because I've used up my entire dental benefit and exhausted my HCSA/FSA for this year. (In retrospect, I should have put aside $4K instead of $3K in my FSA; however, since you lose anything you don't use in the calendar year, I'm leery of over-withholding. How the heck are you supposed to predict these things? FSA's shouldn't expire every calendar year!) Everything resets in January and I'll come back then to get tooth 29 crowned.

The crowns feel funny, but I think that's because I now have gold-crown-on-gold-crown contact, on account of the upper tooth that was already crowned after the root canal earlier this year. I need to get used to the slightly different way my teeth mesh now, and try to not use that premolar for the next five months.

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* This chip is on the inside point of the third tooth from the right rear of my lower teeth, so it would have been quite a trick. In this particular case, I felt the pointy part of the tooth chip off while eating breakfast cereal last week.

The other lower crowns are more or less preventative: both teeth had two old filling in them, and X-rays showed tiny fracture lines starting to form between them. Without the crowns, eventually the teeth might have shattered, which would have been very bad. As it stands now, with a nice pair of gold crowns over them, I expect them to last out the duration.