Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I had an appointment in Reno this afternoon to have my teeth cleaned. I told them that the tooth that they re-crowned earlier this year had never stopped hurting. The dentist had a look and determined that it wasn't meshing correctly. He ground it down slightly so it meshes without constantly banging on the crowned tooth, and it feels better already. It will probably take a while for the soreness to go away, but with luck I will once again be able to chew with the right side of my mouth and drink hot or cold liquids without having to brace for pain on that tooth.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, my dentist recommended removing and replacing two crowns. The cost per crown is $1800. My insurance only covers $1000/year. So today I took a half-day off from work to drive to Reno and have the first crown removed. We'll do the second one on January 2, when my dental benefits reset. They will then send the casts off to the lab to be done, and when they come back, they will install the new crowns. Until then, I have a temporary crown on the first tooth.

This will actually be the third crown on that tooth, because it was crowned once, and then the crown had to be removed to do a root canal on that tooth and a second crown installed. That's the only root canal I've had.

The removal procedure wasn't too bad; nowhere near as bad as the original root canal. I now have the removed gold crown here with me. I expect to take this and the other crown and see if there's any money to be made by selling them for the gold value.

I was grateful to discover that there is on-street parking near my dentist's office, because maneuvering the Rolling Stone into the spaces in their parking lot is tricky, whereas on-street parking is relatively easy.

After paying the $800 that's my share of the first treatment (thank goodness for my healthcare savings account!), I thought I had enough time to get the oil changed in the RV. It has been almost four years since I changed the oil in the Rolling Stone, and while for much of that time I didn't operate it — there was a year where it moved less than one mile — I did think I should get the oil changed. I had a 3 PM chiropractic appointment in Fernley, but I had several hours, and I've rarely been at Jiffy Lube more than an hour, so I headed over there.

It took them nearly three hours to get the word done. There were only three vehicles ahead of me, but one of them must have been immensely complicated. Once they had the RV on the block, it did not take that long, even though I also agreed to have the rear differential fluid changed. It looked awful: dark and sludge-like rather than the relatively light, clear oil that it normally should be.

I called the chiropractor when it became clear that I wasn't going to make the 3 PM appointment and they told to come at 4 PM. I though that would be fine, but as I didn't get out of Jiffy Lube in Sparks until after 3 PM, I though I was screwed. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of traffic working my way from the shop to I-80, and the afternoon crunch hadn't happened yet. Once I got clear of Sparks I put the pedal to the metal, which is something I really do not like doing with the fuel-hungry 460 engine, but I did not have any choice.

Luck seems to have been with me: I made it with five minutes to spare, and the chiropractor's office was running slightly late anyway, so all was well.

So as I said, this is the first of two crown renewals. For most of the next month or more, I'll be living with temporary crowns in the upper right and later lower right portions of my mouth.

...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.