TRIGGER WARNING

Knowing Spanish and having lived in Mexico as a kid for a couple of years opened doors for me here on my Christmas vacation in Mexico this holiday season.  One door it opened was for me to get affordable dental implants yesterday. 

I've been missing two teeth for six months now, something that's not only been cosmetically ugly but that has caused me to lisp when I speak, and I teach community college for a living.  So I had to do something about my two missing teeth.

On Wednesday via email my US dental insurance company told me they'd pay USD$42 of the USD$5,800 total cost of them.  But I found a Mexican oral surgeon here who'd do them for $1,577.  So I put the cost on my credit card and got them done here in Mexico yesterday.  Like that song says, "all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth," right?  Actually, they're two side teeth, but pretty close.  I'm reminding myself to be grateful I can get my teeth done at all.

The dental procedure was a lot more involved than I expected.  Two hours in the chair while the oral surgeon used an actual drill to open two holes in my jaw bone through my gums.  Then he used a tiny socket wrench to screw metal posts into those holes so he can put enamel tooth-like tops on them when they heal.  

I was awake and had a numbing shot, but a shot doesn't numb the bone, so a tear rolled out of my right eye at one point because of the pain.  Glad it's over with.  After we were done, though, the doc told me no walking for 48 hours and to go lie down in my hotel room instead.

I wasn't quite prepared for what it would be like for me alone in a hotel room in that immediate post outpatient surgery.  I'm minding my money so as to afford the dental implants, so my hotel room is bare bones and has no tv to distract me from my PTSD flashbacks as I lay there in bed alone after the procedure.  As you may know from my DS profile or what I've written here before, I got PTSD from a car bombing on the mission field overseas when I was 9.  Then I got it again 6 years later from when I was tortured professionally by a death squad during a military dictatorship's war when I was a 15 year old missionary kid abroad. 

I won't go into graphic detail, but professional torture techniques done by trained torturers mimic what dentists do with people.  Things got a little grim there for me for a few hours later yesterday, therefore, as I struggled with flashback after flashback alone in silence post dental implants with no tv or other distractions to help change the subject and get my mind off things.

Glad I knew I could post here about it the next day.  It helped me feel less alone through the night as I looked forward to logging back on here at DS PTSD for support.  The swelling's going down.  Looking forward to getting out and about now.