The dentist visit ...

It went as well as I expected truthfully. Of course I expected it to be horrible and it was.
It's not my dentist's fault. It's not the hygenist's fault. It really is the fault of my old dentist. The one I had to leave after he freaked out my oldest dd and gave her an intense fear of the dentists and after he told me for a mere 30,000 dollars he could fix my jaw forever (which 3 consultations with other dentists all said, not hardly.
Anyway, roughly 7.5 years ago he fitted me with an orthodontic split for my jaw. He told me I would have to wear it for 6 months tops. 6 months passed, my bottom teeth began decaying at a rapid rate. He told me my jaw was not quite healed and I should wear it a bit longer and by the way, brush my teeth more. And then 6 months later, my teeth were worse and I had to still keep the splint on. Fast forward another year. He yelled at me for not taking care of my spilt well enough and told me I was ruining all my teeth. I explained to him very carefully how I was (what I thought) taking great care of my mouth. That's when he said "That's not how to to properly take care of your split." Umm, okay, could have used the CORRECT way to clean it 2 years ago when I first got it idiot. And yet, I still returned. The splint, I was told needed to stay on a bit longer.
And that's when he told me the splint had to stay on permanently unless I dropped 30,000 dollars and essentially had crowns put on all my teeth to correct my bite and teeth alignment and then my jaw would be fixed forever.
Crowns. On. All. My. Teeth. Even the healthy ones.
At first I was going to jump right in and let him do it. Dh and I discussed how we would pay for it and get it taken care of, and oh yeah, he never talked to us about getting my wisdom teeth pulled and shouldn't we do that first?
No, he said, let get started on the work.
And someone (on-line actually) convinced me to get a second opinion. I did. And a third. And a fourth. And they all said the same thing - what was this guy thinking. And they wouldn't let him do that to their mouths. And oh yeah, by the way, if you have impacted wisdom teeth, pulling them out can crack crowns so if I did go that route, get the wisdom teeth removed first.
So I stopped going to quack dentist and started seeing a new dentist.
He sent me to the oral surgeon to get the wisdom teeth out. He took care of the bottom teeth decay (some of which the old dentist didn't fill because it wasn't necessary despite the fact I complained of pain) and sent me to an orthodontist. Now here is where it gets fun. He looked over my stuff and said I used to have proper alignment but because of all the work old dentist did, my teeth bo longer were alligned and it would take extensive work to fix it. And on top of it all, he didn't think the standard treatment for TMJ would help my jaw anyway and thought I needed to go and see someone who specialized only in TMJ. And come to think of it, I didn't even have TMJ symptoms really, that I might want to get a CT scan so they could really see my jaw clearly.
And then I got pregnant, which makes everything even more complicated. And now, I am not pregnant and won't be, so we can really work on my mouth.
And yesterday I found out that truely, I need to wear the orthodontic split (which is like this big huge thing that sits on my bottom teeth and looks nasty and I'm commonly asked about what is on my teeth @@) for life or I really do probably need to crown all the teeth on the bottom if I don't want to wear it. :::sigh:::
And I have about 4 cavaties on the bottom. The top teeth look fine. The dental appliace I wear basically leaves it next to impossible for my teeth to stay clean for very long at all because since it sits on top of my teeth it literally holds bacteria on my teeth and I am supposed to wear it 24/7.
I almost burst into tears yesterday. I wish I could go back 8 years. I wish I had decided to see a different dentist. I wish I never had that thing put in my mouth to begin with. I wish I knew that taking that step pretty much locked me into it for life.
So really, the *best thing for me to do is get crowns and get rid of this split I wear. But as you can imagine, crowns will take time and money. None of which I have a lot of extra of. So since my old split is falling apart and at this point I cna't chew food without it in my mouth, I will have to pay for another one. Blech.
The only *good thing I heard was I can take it out except for when I'm eating and sleeping and see how my jaw holds up. The few other times we have tried this, I get a few days before my jaw starts locking up and back in it goes. I am praying that this time I can last longer. If I only had to wear part time it would help a LOT.