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Comments on Sunday 27 March 2005:
More actual things from my life. None of them particularly interesting, but more interesting than most actual things posts people make, so I won't feel too bad about it.

A week or two ago, I got a tooth pulled. It's a tooth that's had a huge gaping hole in it for about three years, because an old (crazy, oversized) filling fell out. The dentist offered me the options of saving the tooth (at least three appointments, nerve work, and stuff) or yoinking it. Or rather, I suggested refilling or pulling when I went in, whichever he thought more appropriate for the specific tooth, and he explained what the differences would be in work done. Obviously I chose pulling. I never really wanted that tooth anyway, and it's always been crowding the adjacent wisdom tooth a bit. Mr Dentist also told me I 'need' stupid amounts of crazy dentist-performed cleaning and minor fillings and stuff. He suggested this with exactly the same urgency as the last dentist I went to, over six years ago. So if my teeth can go six years without this surgery they 'need', and without getting any worse in the meantime (except for the one - which got worse because of previous dental work), I think I'll pass, thanks. Even the tooth with the gaping dentist-induced hole didn't get any worse in the three years its hole was gaping - I just decided to get rid of it now on a whim, and because Australian dentists are supposed to be less offensive than the dentists of elsewhere. Which he was, to be fair - the tooth-pulling was an order of magnitude less dramatic than any of the four teeth I had pulled for pointless orthodontic reasons about ten years ago (in the UK), despite being a wider tooth.

I also decided, based on that dentist visit, that when I'm extremely rich I shall have a dentist chair installed for me to work in. They are so very ridiculously comfortable, and they have those big swingy arms that would be ideal for mounting screens and keyboards and things onto, such that they could be positioned neatly in your field of vision even while looking up at a comfortable pillow-rested 60-degree angle.

Some time since then, my abdomen has been bitten multiple times by some sort of insect; I suspect ants, since they've been appearing around the house individually with no apparent trails of them. It itches much worse than flea-bites, swells much less, and lasts much longer.

Today, I performed another Makeshift Home Handyman operation, on the TV reception again. Last time it was a cable with a dodgy connector; this time the wall socket. About a year ago I removed the wall socket from the wall to see what was up with it, and found the answer "the central wire-pin is far too short". That seemed likely to be a pain to deal with, so I didn't. Since then the TV reception has been getting gradually worse, while being shored up with the standard techniques such as "jamming several DVD cases against the socket just so" and "twisting the socket around while pushing the cable in with your teeth". Today the TV guide had something in it that sounded maybe worth recording, which was the final impetus to bother to try to sort the blasted thing out. So I removed the socket entirely, pulled a random useless wire from my box'o'wires (note: another definition of "random useless wire" in this context is "the next wire I'll discover I need one of"), cut and stripped a short piece of said wire, soldered it onto the too-short wire in the wall, soldered it again because it didn't hold, soldered it again because it still didn't hold, and then put the contraption all back together again with the newly extended wire screwed into position. Result - even the channel that has never been watchable at all is now watchable, and the other channels are all so free of snow that shows about Alaska are full of really confused-looking desert moose.

And the TV-guided movie "Kopps" was excellent, so it wasn't even a waste of effort. [12:31]

der vaalrus
Trust me, you'll pay for that dental cynicism. The "expensive dentist cleaning" can be substituted by a modern "sonic" toothbrush (a'la SonicCare, or the equivalent competing brand). The reduction or reversal in the effects of gum disease is astounding, and much more comfortable than the plasma lance the dentist seems to use. Plus: with a spare head, the sonic brush is an EXCELLENT gentle cleaner for electronic devices such as gummed print-heads and other tough bench cleaning chores.

Fillings, however, are much trickier. "Worse" is difficult to measure, and by the time the tooth hurts, all manner of bad things are afoot and much too late. Having my share of root-canal treatment and symtomless teeth that suddenly spawn massive deep-root abcesses. Over a five year period, I'm out of pocket about 7000 CAN$. That's my own pocket as self-employed comes without dental insurance. There was a lovely lovely 12 year period with 0 problems, aside from a filling that fell out.

Fillings are cheap, and have several options. Root canal and bridgework and/or implants are decidedly less so.

RavenBlack
I still opt for the cynicism - six years with apparently no change in problem severity (based on dentist mutterings), with, even if things have deteriorated, no guarantee that having had fillings for the same period would have prevented that (and that they may well have resulted in more fillings falling out leaving huge holes), *plus* the fact of having to pay if I choose to gamble on fillings being a better risk than non-fillings... Really not a compelling option.

Sonic toothbrushes sound more compelling, but my gums don't really feel particularly diseased, and I'm a bit leary of violent teeth-cleaning; for all I know the lowest layer of crud is a nice protective crud which, if removed, would open the tooth to all sorts of much worse corrosive crud.

And if it turns out I'm wrong, well, maybe they'll have perfected that "new teeth grown from your own DNA" thing they're working on by then.

ruthvenmoon
I chipped a tooth 4 years ago. 89% of why I refuse to see a dentist about it is because I don't want to be lectured for half an hour. Then after that, enjoy his speech about regular cleanings and recommendations for new toothpaste which just happens to be stocked in his waiting room.
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