Hello Crafties! It's time that I once again give you a little glimpse into my personal life. 😅
Note: I initially set out to post this blog on Tuesday after my appointment but Spectrum had other plans for me in the form of another 4 day outage. I wanted to write a mini announcement during my absence but didn't have enough cell data to do it. Woops! Regardless of the time line, I've got an exciting update today. Story time! 💖🦷
On November 7th, I got some better news from the oral surgeon.
In September of 2022, I fell on my face and broke a front tooth. And I have been just dealing with it since then, hopping around various dentists with and without insurance, trying to get straightforward answers on how I could get this fixed. I've been growing sort of hopeless about the whole thing because I have been so limited in my own resources and medicaid is incredibly picky when it comes to the dentist. Anyhoo...
The last major update that I'd had was that they were going to just have to take out my front tooth,
which lead to the whole conversation of an implant. Perhaps if it hadn't been the front of my face and affecting my ability to eat and speak, I would have been less pushy about it. Nonetheless, after a little over a year, I got back in at the dental school and received a second opinion.
What I gained was actually an immense amount of hope for the first time since the fall because they think it can be saved with extrusion. I don't know where to begin with how excited I am to move forward and though it may take a while to actually be scheduled for procedures, I'm looking at that as a silver lining.
I share this update for a couple of reasons. For one, I started sharing this whole mishap with y'all nearly two years ago! I kept hearing more of the same thing over and over for months and ran out of updates to really give until now. There have been quite a few people to chime in and buy me coffees for the cause and I appreciate that because it's helping me prepare to cover these dental expenses that I'm fairly certain ✨medicaid✨ will give me grief over.
This whole thing is another reason I've been encouraging my audiences to engage with my website and what I offer outside of the channels because collectively, all of that support is going toward improving my quality of life right now.
I can't put into words how tremendously grateful I am to those of you who've chosen to support me through my business so willingly. Because believe it or not, I've gotten a few snide comments here and there on the topic and I usually ignore them , sure. But I've read them nonetheless so I am grateful to everyone who has just been there and supported me, the person, through all of this mess.
So thank you for supporting and not trying to rip at what I work so hard at here with my channel and business. It means a lot more than the word count here allows. 💖
I'm not too emotional about things in general but I almost cried at the prospect of being able to speak and eat properly again.
✨A Side Note✨
Currently, though I am no longer making public tutorials, I am finishing up the project for May so I can share it next week with my patrons. Life has been so incredibly hectic and stressful for me and my family for the last two months and I'm very grateful to those who have continued their support of me to this point. I'll still be taking off in the month of June. It has been a struggle trying save to get to this point due to several unforeseen family emergencies and circumstances.
I am on a mad hunt for a job that will tide me over for these three paychecks I'll be missing out on more so than trying to relax, unfortunately 😅. At some point this year, I plan on showing off all the pottery that I have stashed since last fall.
The next chapter of this saga...
Today, I finally had my much anticipated date for a root canal on this front tooth. Thankfully, the dental school is more financially attainable than private practices so this appointment, because my insurance would not cover this, ran me $350. I almost talked myself out of going today because, a know... being out of work for nearly two months makes you look at money entirely differently. Where a few months ago, I would have been more eager to just march right in that office, now I find myself wondering if necessities are actually necessary.
My biggest worry was that the tooth would be inoperable because of the two years it took to get to this point. And that I would have wasted $350 that I could have used for food and gas. But I went ahead and decided to not let this raise my blood pressure.
It's been such a long road here and you can see the feed of tweets to the right:
In my time of reflection, I'm pretty sure part of my push to make my channels work out was that I desperately needed to get this done. But as I've stated before, I feel very weird about asking for help and would much rather folks chime in because they love my products and services.
But the past is the past now I suppose and I'm working on being detached from everything as much as I can at the moment. So when these behind the scenes projects come to fruition, I can be the best, non-salty version of myself and continue to serve the maker space.
There we go with more of my typical digressions! But at this point, I don't think they're a bad thing because I would like for my existing community to see more of me and my personality going forward, so cheers!
As for the behind the scenes stuff, it will fundamentally change how I take on new content in the future and that's all I can say for now! 💖
Anyhoo, the dentist!
Admittedly, I was a lil anxious going in because last November, the viability of the tooth in question was still up in the air. I made sure to be like half an hour early and have all the things registration might ask me for. To add to my anxiety, we still had to go through a consult before they began any work...
Thanks be to God, the lead doctor decided that work could be done!
Beware if you're squeamish but here's a photo of the injury the say it happened in September of 2022.
I could have cried from the sheer amount of relief from that verdict because it was all that I'd been praying and fighting for these last couple of years. I'd busted up my tooth and gums pretty bad in that fall, come to find out, a lot worse than I'd realized.
Once they did a sensitivity test on it, I could still just barely feel the temperature in it and that was enough to go on. In retrospect, I was probably the HAPPIEST root canal patient they'd ever seen.
The extent of the work they did was far more than a root canal though and it took about three hours on the table to do it. Basically, they removed the "fragment" which was quite literally the whole tooth. Might I add, the "fragment" was rotting out from the inside due to the existing damage existing for so long. It was a true marvel and it was a blessing that it wasn't infected with the extent of the rot. After the removal of the fragment, they had to get a little creative and do the prediscussed (lol not a word) backwards.
They started by performing an extrusion because there was so little of the tooth left. there was fracture under the gum line at the back and so they needed to pull the tooth down a few millimeters so that they could build onto it later.
Forgive me for all the various photos. This ordeal has been my own personal hell for the last couple of years and I wanted to keep good records on it because I knew at one point or another, I'd get this fixed.
So after the extrusion, they placed a splint on it to stabilize what they'd just done. Then came the the actual root canal! None of it was particularly awful thankfully and in the end, I was given follow up info and I get to go back next week so they can check on the healing and change out the rigid splint with a more flexible one.
Eventually the idea is that they'll build this thing up until they can get a crown on it!
This little journey is coming to a head and I'm so excited to finally get my life back.
In the meanwhile, I'll be updating the goal on Ko-fi to reflect this new development. That new goal will be about ~$750 usd to cover for any surprise charges that may arise. So it you want to help me out right now, you can.
Regardless, thanks for caring enough to read this post.
Happy Making! 💖
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