Thanks for all that input y'all!!

Well, thankfully I wasn't actually waiting for my blogger friends to console me on losing YET ANOTHER tooth. Thankfully as a 46 year old woman I can (and do) make decisions for myself.

I had that damn molar pulled, and cried through it all. Losing a tooth is losing a part of your person (in my humble opinion).

On to happier things: We're going hiking/camping on Friday night and then going to the Tom Petty concert on Saturday night. What made me finally decide to do a hike-out, I hear you asking? Well, the fact that the majority of this group is older and slower than me was the winning point. I won't be the slow one, and even though I'm the newest to this adventure of carrying everything you need to camp on your back...I won't be the one Chris is focused upon - for a change. So far the backpacks are clean, the sleeping bags are washed and ready to tie on, I have my clothes and personal stuff bagged up. Next is the food we're taking and the essentials - like the French Press coffee pot, the cooking pot, and don't forget the camera!! Somebody will no doubt take a picture of Jana in her backpack so it'll get posted here for all your enjoyment!!

I've been seeing Fay quite a bit, though my daughter is still not treating me like anything more than a wad of wet chewing gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe. She's smoking again and is sending cash to that idiot ex-boyfriend of hers from clear back in the olden days. God I could just rip her hair out by the roots. She tells me she's smart mature and able to handle her own life, then this crap comes up. I can understand her following so closely in her mother's footsteps, but I can't understand her hating me for it.

To pull or not to pull

THAT is the question.

Well - for some time I've been grinding my teeth. There's been this chasm of tension between me and Amanda, there was that 10 days between visits with Fay. There's been a lot of tension in my life lately, and so I guess I'm grinding my teeth. The problem with this?

Here's the deal: The upper and lower molar on the right side broke on eachother. The upper one the dentist could fix with a simple filling. The lower one, however, appears to have cracked through. The x-ray doesn't show anything--because x-ray's don't show anything going on inside the tooth, can't show a crack in the root either. So - after I got my teeth cleaned, there begun this deep throbbing pain in my lower molar. I thought geez what did the woman do to me? A subsequent check showed the dentist a "rather ominous" crack. He said if it's cracked this way it's this procedure, if it's cracked this way its a root canal and crown. Or - we could try this.. or we can wait, or we can try antibiotics.

So I said to him if you can't fix it with a filling, pull it. Ok - he dug it out and filled it. After the numbing stuff wore off, the throbbing started back up. Ok - strike one. I went back and he filed off the filling some more - so the upper and lower teeth don't meet unless there's food between them. He said if the filling doesn't work the next step is a root canal and crown. Strike two.

WOAHHHH chuckie - we're talking $2,000 or better. My fatherinlaw says avoid the root canal. The dentist says that's it to save the tooth. The online system makes me think the root canal won't do anything for me, if the root is cracked this won't help. The only thing that will work is pulling it.

So the question to those of you that have been here is this: What do you suggest? Have you had a root canal? Did it help? Was the root possibly cracked to start with? I have a crown already that was a result from a disintigrating tooth around a filling. This new cracked tooth is right next to the crown, and so the crown will be the only molar on the lower side if I have the cracked one pulled . It sounds like to me I'm going to lose that tooth eventually anyway.

I guess after I get some genuine input here I'll have to decide about it. Chris of course says have it pulled. I've been reading up about in-plants to replace the row of left upper molars I don't have. I have been told to avoid in-plants - period!!!! I don't know... I'm only 46, I hate to think of my entire future life with no molars, nothing to be able to chew anything tougher than bread and raw vegetables? Oatmeal and cream corn, here I come. sigh............