I agree about the teeth thing. I’m late 40’s and my teeth are not the straightest Or nicest but not thing I always did was brush them well pretty much every day. Including my tongue, well. That’s where bad breath comes from. I refrained from dental visits for as long as a decade, what can I say? I have not always had medical benefits. I’d get them and go into the dentist, he would be pissed off at me, and wouldn’t believe that I hadn’t been to a dentist. He didn’t believe me. I’d have a few cavities. One of them was a doozy, which he fixed. He’s like you didn’t feel that? I was like no. Only if I ate sweets. A chocolate bar or something. Well don’t eat sweets, he says. Yeah right…
Which ironically is the only tooth I am currently missing. It’s a molar. Maybe 5 years later I was doing something stupid, snacking on corn nuts and I’m pretty sure it broke then. A few weeks later, eating a muffin a chunk of it came off. For sure. I crunched it. A blueberry muffin doesn’t do that. What I did about it, was stupid. I ignored it. It didn’t completely break off, but a piece was loose. I let it go for years, if you can believe that. Avoided biting, chewing down on it. Until I couldn’t ignore it because it really broke off and then instantly within days you could smell the infection. I was almost knocking people back with the smell. And then a few days later, It really swelled up my face. So I went in there to see him, he checked it out, and was thinking about how to approach it. A good dentist. I just told him, look, that tooth is messed, it’s the last repair you made to it 10 years ago, if you need to get rid of it, just pull it. He looked at the antibiotic prescription I got at the hospital because I couldn’t wait, told me it was alright, take that we, come back in 2 weeks. I did, the infection was down, he told me it was a good thing because he had some particularly nasty anti biotics he would have prescribed. So he pulled it. It was absolutely my fault it came to that. It might have been alright after the muffin, but I let it go for years until it was dead.
But other than that, I don’t do stupid things like Corn Nuts any more and my teeth are fine with few trips to the dentist. He’s retired shortly after extracting that tooth. I honestly don’t know if I could trust another dentist tbh.
