Corinne CrawfordJodi left early in the morning and it was just Debbie and I left. Debbie did some shopping while I did some work and worried about my dentist appointment later that afternoon. Our favorite taxi driver, John, picked me up and took me to the other side of town to the dentist I had made an appointment with to deal with my bad tooth. He could tell I was nervous and gave me some encouraging words as he dropped me off. He wasn’t sure if he was going to be available after my appointment but he said I could text him when I was done to see if he was available. I entered the office and for some reason, it was necessary to put little plastic booties on over my shoes in addition to wearing my mask. Ok. The dentist and his team took some time checking my mouth out and explaining what they were going to do. They took some additional X-rays including a 3D x-ray so they could see more what they were dealing with but he warned me that based on what he could see, I had a vertical crack in my back tooth and it might not be able to be saved. I told him to do whatever it took to save it to be able to put a crown on because the only other option would be to have it removed and get a dental implant down the road. He said he would make no promises but would try. They numbed me up real good and then he went to work with a drill to remove my previous filling so he could see more of the crack. At first he was encouraged because he said the crack did not go all the way down but that optimism did not last long when he looked at the X-rays and it turns out I had both a vertical and horizontal crack. How this happens, I have no idea but I suppose it is possible that when I had my last filling in that tooth, it weakened the tooth to the point where it took very little to crack it. Probably should have had a root canal and crown at that point but I didn’t know. Because the weakened tooth had now caused some gum damage, he wanted to send me to the periodontist to see what they thought about my gums abilility to accommodate a root canal- again, I have no idea the details of what all this means but you have to trust the professionals, right? It was now 5:00pm, however, they arranged for me to see a periodontist just two blocks away right then. I walked down there and they were able to see me within about 15 minutes. She took one look and said she was sorry but the tooth was not going to be able to be saved and had to come out. She said that she would do a bone graft where the tooth had been so that I would have something for a dental implant to go into in the future if I choose to do that. The bone graft was synthetic but to help my body accept it, they drew some blood and said they would mix that in so that my body would better accept the graft and heal better. She numbed me up again as it was sort of wearing off from the first round. The tooth came out, she did her graft and stitched me back up using dissolving thread as I would not be in town for her to take out normal ones in ten days time.
She wrote me some prescriptions for antibiotics and pain meds along with a mouth rinse. I walked out with my mouth numb and gauze in there and some ice for my jaw where they said I would experience some pain and swelling. She advised that for at least a day, I needed to have nothing but room temperature soup. I texted John, the taxi driver, but he messaged me back that he was not available so at first I was going to just hail another taxi but as I was walking I noticed the subway station and just decided to take the subway to the same place I first arrived in town so that I could hit a pharmacy before they closed as it was now going on 8:30pm. I found a pharmacy, got my drugs and walked the rest of the 10 minutes back to the hotel. The numbness was just starting to wear off and pain was coming in. I had texted Debbie to let her know I was on the way and she was nice enough to work with the receptionist at the hotel to get me some soup delivered to the room where I could wait for it to cool off and eat it. After I ate the soup, I took some of the pain meds and went to bed so thankful that Debbie was there to take good care of me. I woke up still in pain and quite swollen. Debbie was leaving at about 9am and I bid her goodbye and just stayed in bed the rest of the day and night. I had arranged to stay at the hotel longer as I recovered but they were out of availability in a day so I only had one more night I could stay so I did some research to see where I was going to go next. I had it in my mind that I wanted to go to Morocco and Portugal with the month I had left but flights to Morocco were much cheaper leaving from Portugal and because I wanted to go to Portugal anyway, I decided to fly there first and booked my ticket for a flight from Athens to Lisbon. I looked for a place to stay near the city center and verified that they would be there for a super late check in as my flight landed at 11:00pm and by the time I got my bag and did a taxi, it would probably be at least midnight by the time I got there.
