Sad Tooth

For the last 2 years I've gotten this strange pain around my upper left 2 molars.  The pain usually last just a few days and it comes and goes without any rhyme or reason to.  For the last week and a half the pain has lasted though and last night as I was flossing I did something that caused excruciating pain to spread throughout the whole left side of my mouth.  It about knocked me out it was so bad.  So I did what any good kid does and I called my mom.  She's a pharmacist, but seems to be the smartest woman alive when it comes to ANYTHING health-related.  She thought it might be an abscess and made sure I set up a dentist appointment for the next day.

Well this morning was quite the adventure trying to not just get an appointment, but get APPROVED to go in somewhere.  When I got married, I was taken off of my parents insurance, but then at the beginning of this year, the policy changed so that I could be put back on.  Apparently, not all the t's were crossed, however because after I finally got an appointment and got the info to the dental office, they called me back later to tell me that I wasn't actually on the insurance so I had to pay everything right then and there if I wanted to be seen.

Dejected, I called my mom back and she came to the rescue, of course.  Moms are so good like that.  So I went in and found out that my two back molars are spread farther apart than normal so even though I floss regularly, small particles of food easily work their way up into the gums and start to irritate it, leading to a small infection.  I can't even begin to tell you how bad it hurt when the dentist was just poking around to find out what was going on.  They did a heavy-duty-deep cleaning to get EVERYTHING out that wasn't supposed to be there and inserted an antibiotic up under the gum that releases it's stuff over the course of a month.  They had to numb me twice for it all because it was so intense.

Interestingly, this was a rather humbling experience for me today.  When I got home from my mission, I tried so hard to be an independent adult.  I wouldn't accept my parents help on much of anything, though they were more than willing to give it.  I've learned a lot from that, but have learned things in a harder way than I needed to.  Then when I got married, I seriously stopped accepting things from them except for gifts for birthdays or Christmas.  Again, didn't really need to, I was just trying to prove to myself that I could do this whole adult thing.  This morning though, I think my hard head softened a little bit because I was forced to see that I couldn't do everything by myself.  Sure I'm an adult in many ways, but I'll always need my parents for different things.  I'm just so grateful to have parents who, even though I rejected what they were trying to offer me, are still willing to give to me lovingly.

So thanks Mom and Dad.  Y'all are pretty darn great.