I went to the Foot Clinic this morning, and, as I had feared, the cast stays on for at least another two weeks. The podiatrist took the tape off the bottom, moved the sock covering the cast up toward my ankle, and put her nose close and took a biiiiig sniff. Apparently if something is festering inside this is the only way to find out short of cutting the cast off. She then hit the cast a few times to see whether it was cracked. Apparently all is well and they will see me again in two weeks.
I told them that if it wasn’t off by May 12th (my installation day) I would cut it off myself. They promised that they would take it off before then. If I still need it, they’ll put another one on the next week. However, I am hopeful that 6 weeks in the cast will be sufficient to heal the ulcer.
Last night I was eating something and suddenly felt something hard in my mouth (keep your minds on the curb, please!) It was a piece of my left lower second molar. This tooth was pretty much gutted and filled with a load of amalgam back in the 1980’s, and the dentist said it would last for about 20 years or so. Well, I guess he was right. Now I have to go to the dentist here and, I suspect, have the tooth pulled. I don’t think that there’s enough left to put a crown on it. Crumbs!
AAaaargh! Just for that tooth story (aargh!), I’ll let out my neighbor’s foot tale that I’ve been holding in for months: dear Michel’s toes went first, but now the whole bit’s gone up to the knee, poor thing. He and Ron live right around the corner, Chris Waigl and I went to see Michel’s art work at the Gay Center when she was here. I didn’t want to scare you with his horror foot.
But the tooth, man! Good luck with it!
I think you’ve already said too much, max
Believe me, I’ve seen as bad as that at the Foot Clinic, and maybe even worse.
I wonder if they transfer you to some other clinic once both feet have been lopped off.
Dentists no longer want to just pull a tooth. There’s no money in that. They’ll want to replace the tooth with a post they can attach a crown to. They expect big bucks for that.
Before they do the replacement, they may try to milk your wallet by having repeated examinations to see if they can save the tooth. They managed to drag it out almost two years when they did mine. I finally got the teeth pulled, then refused to make an appointment for the artificial post installation.
The whole thing cost at least ten times what it should have.
Bah. Mr Hansen has been calm and informative such that my original fears that dear Michel from Quebec was not long for this world have been allayed and indeed he has been seen bopping around with Ron in their car, and a bit with his prosthetic. Better than at first, certainly.
Michel’s art is lovely, just ask Chris Waigl. Ron and Michel are a wonderful couple, and they have a delicious boy doggie, slightly larger than Penny Lane, much friendlier (how could he not be), named Mardi Gras!
Here I haven’t seen Foot Clinics but Wound Clinics.
Do remember that I live in the United Kingdom. Here dentists who work for the NHS do not get big bucks for anything. When people go private, they get big bucks.
When HWMBO had a problem with one of his wisdom teeth, it affected the tooth next to it. Our dentist sent him to Kings to have the wisdom tooth pulled, then two weeks later told him that the other one had to go and whipped it out. No post, no mess, no fuss.
There are some advantages to socialised medicine, you see.
Hm. The clinic I go to is a specialised Diabetic Foot Clinic. They not only treat foot and leg ulcers, but they do things like angioplasty of the arteries/veins in your legs to improve the circulation.
In the last couple of years, I’ve heard a lot more about Peripheral Artery Disease, diagnosis and treatment, so there’s that…
I just went through a treatment straight out of the Dentist’s Hymn (“Crown Him With Many Crowns” ;-). I had two fractured teeth which were pretty much all filling and no actual tooth. The dentist did a root canal on both teeth, then built up a superstructure with some kind of material that bakes to hardness under UV light, and crowned those two teeth as well as the adjacent ones, four in all. It’s wickedly expensive but the results are wonderful to behold.
Oh, and I did get back a bit of gold: the old crown on one of the four teeth needed replacement and the dentist asked if I wanted it, as they just throw them away — that I found difficult to believe, but obviously they can’t re-use it clinically, and I suspect the volume or purity of replaced crowns is insufficient to make it worthwhile to save them up for sale to traders in gold for coinage or jewelry. So here it sits, in a little sterile envelope, and there’s even a little hole worn into the side of it should I want to wear it on a chain or something.
Yes, the two approaches are polar opposites, maximize dentist profits vs. minimize dental expense. There is some value to being able to save a tooth but not as much as the dentists here would have you believe. The trouble is, there is no middle ground and both of us find ourselves with little choice in the matter. We are stuck at our respective extremes.