You Know the Drill

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My second dentist appointment is tomorrow.  I've been on the antibiotic for two weeks now and he's going to extract the back molar on the upper left with the infected root.  What's left of it.  One puss wrapped root attached to a stub barely peeking above the gum.

It did not help my anxiety to hear him say that he hopes it is a simple extraction and does not become oral surgery.

Also tomorrow he is going to scrape calcification off the neighboring tooth which also has a large cavity.  He is hoping he can prep that cavity for a filling without exposing the root.  Otherwise to save it would require several procedures with a final cost amounting to more than twice what we paid for our last used car. None of which can be performed at this sliding scale office.

So if that happens I'll be telling him to yank it too.

Then probably later this month I'll be back to have him look at the tooth just under the one he is hoping to fill.  This one is also not salvageable.  It is shaped much like Crater Lake.  A jagged edge around a bowl whose bottom is exposed gum.  I fear any morning now I'm going to wake to the pain signaling that the root has been exposed.  I'm certain it too is infected.

There is one more broken tooth to fix on the other side.  I don't know if Medicaid will cover that one though as the rules seem to insist that only procedures done to alleviate debilitating pain or infection can be covered.  And the rules governing this sliding scale dentist office allow only one x-ray per visit so I had to choose which 1/6 of my mouth to have him look at first.

I think I chose wrong because the lower jaw on the left is the one hurting the worst since the day after that appointment.

I've been living with some level of infection and pain from low grade to excruciating since 1998 when there was an abscess on the tooth he is extracting tomorrow.  I was on SSI and medicaid then too and I called around (when I wasn't sitting on the floor kicking the couch and swooning) everywhere north of Longview to Olympia and south to Portland and couldn't find a single one willing to take on a new Medicaid patient.

The next time I saw a dentist was in 2000 when Ed's tech job in the Silicon Valley provided insurance that covered it.  But I'd barely got started before the dot.com crash and we lost everything.  They'd only taken all the x-rays and set up a plan and done the cleaning.

The next time after that was in 2006 when Ed's job in the Rogue Valley finally offered a dental plan with a co-pay we could afford.  But I got only one visit with the dentist that time.  The one where they take all the x-rays and show you what is going to need to be done.  But my blood pressure was too high and they refused to start the work until my doctor signed off.  It took my doctor a year to get my BP under control with four meds taken daily and by then we no longer had that dental plan.

Recently in all my reading about blood pressure I learned that infected teeth and gums can contribute significantly to it.  And that just confirms what I've always felt--that the health of the mouth and teeth is as much a medical issue as any other aspect of the body.

It has always mystified me why dental work is treated as if it has little to do with medicine or well being and classified as elective and cosmetic.  Nice to have if you can afford it but not necessary until the pain gets so bad its making you mental and even then doing what's necessary to save the tooth is still considered elective.  Like face lifts and tummy tucks or BMWs and sapphire tiaras.

I wonder how much of what they are treating as depression is really, at least in part, the low energy and fatigue caused by that chronic infection and pain.

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It's Like This

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I have a massive sinus headache tonight.  I'm sure it's at least partially due to the several hundred liters of tears I've shed since Thursday evening.  But it's probably partly cat hair and dander from all the cuddling Merlin has been getting and pollen from taking him for excursions in the yard, and dust I've stirred up while unpacking the last van load from our house in Phoenix, and cleaning and rearranging the areas of the rooms I'm using at Mom's.  Then there is the fact that the light on the central air system shows it is time to clean the filter.

The tears (for those just tuning int) are from having had to just leave my husband behind again Friday morning without any idea this time when the next time will be or where now that the last of my stuff is our of our house and by tomorrow so will be Ed and his stuff.

Today's main task was the appointment with the Social Security Administration about getting me back on disability based on my visual impairment.    This was the latest aftershock generated by the lifequake that hit me in late January when I learned that I was no longer covered by insurance from Ed's job.  This created the dilemma that has me feeling like I'm caught in a snare that is binding me hands and feet.

Options are few.  None of them desirable.

My health issues are life-threatening without medical care with blood pressure and mood disorder being the primary issues.  But even with the part-time nature of Ed's job and the fact that for half the year or more he draws unemployment--a week or two out of every month between Christmas and Halloween--he makes too much for me to qualify for aide. The waiting list for getting on the Oregon Health Plan is nearly a year long.  Thus, in order to get my health issues tended to I have to not be living with him.

Or in other words I can live.  Or I can live with my husband.  So much for Defense of Marriage, right?

The last time I was on SSI disability Ed was not working at all.  He was drawing unemployment for a time until that ran out but then it was just my SSI that was supporting us both and we couldn't afford to risk the medical benefits aspect of it for him to take a job that did not include medical benefits for me.

Eventually he did find one having used the time he was unemployed to teach himself HTML and several other web development skills and snagging a tech job in the Silicon Valley in the late 90s that took us out of the poverty level for the first time ever.  That lasted 22 months before the dot.com crash in 2001 took it away from us and we had to move in with his folks in the Rogue Valley and he took the job he still has with a company whose primary products are seasonal and/or holiday.  Except for Fruit of the Month and Dessert of the Month Clubs.

Only an honored few below management level are kept on year around and most of those are kept at part time.  But they would continue to make health insurance part of the perks as a way to control turnover and hang onto the cadre that would train and supervise the battalions of seasonal workers hired for the fruit packing season in the fall and the Christmas season between Halloween and New Year.  A year ago they took that away from the part timers and took hours away from them to insure they wouldn't have to provide it.

It was the health coverage that made that job indispensable in spite of the income keeping us under the poverty level and unable to get into our own home again for over a decade.  It was only because our recent landlord was a friend who waived first, last and deposits and took some of the rent in labor that we were able to get into the trailer Christmas week of 2011.  Now he has to sell the trailer and had to ask us to move out.

Which nixed our plan for Ed to hang onto the job and the house down there while I lived with my Mom and applied for aide in order to maintain my meds until we could get on the Oregon Health Plan so I could come home.  Now there is no home to come back to and Ed is moving back in with his folks.

And I just found out today that I probably shouldn't be on the waiting list for the Oregon Health Plan while I'm living in Washington.  So there goes that hope.

And again I say, So much for Defense of Marriage yadayda.  Obviously those guys aren't all that concerned about preserving marriages or they wouldn't create programs that create such impossible dilemmas for married couples.

So the waterworks are going full force this week as I struggle to deal with all of this while in the throes of an unstabilized mood disorder--missing Ed, grieving over the loss of our home, trying to find how to fit into the chaos of this household run by my baby sister around the needs of our elderly blind mother, feeling like a burden to my family and intense shame as I jump through the social service hoops...

The next hoop is Thursday when I get the eye exam that proves I'm still legally blind and haven't experienced a miracle cure for Retinitas Pigmentosa in the last two decades.

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Sunday Serenity #325

Us Summer 2011

I'm going to do something I rarely do here and post a full face picture of myself.  This in honor of the fact that all of my serenity and joy of the last week is wrapped up in what this pic represents.  It was taken of Ed and I at Rice Hill OR where he'd met my sister and I to transfer my stuff from her car to his Dad's car upon my return from the  May-August visit at Mom's in Longview.  When I'd gone for Mother's day and stayed for my niece's wedding in July and my sister Jamie's surgery in August.

Anyone following my blog this month will know that we nearly split the week of Valentine's but managed to stop the bleeding of our broken hearts before they bled out via some intense email exchanges.  Then this past Thursday my sister drove me down after more of my stuff I'm going to need for the extended stay at Mom's and Ed and I had some intense face-to-face encounters that began the healing process.

My extended stay in Longview is for tending to a health crisis brought on by loss of my meds after we lost health insurance through Ed's job.  So I'm staying here where my sister can be advocate, phone contact and chauffeur as I get the necessary help and until something can be established back home to carry it forward once I'm stabilized again.

I have mentioned my various health issues here in the past but do not dwell on them nor feature them very often.  I will break that tradition now as my life is becoming an exercise in getting healthy and independent so that I can step up as full and equal partner with my husband and I can't imagine continuing to blog daily if I try to keep all of this private.

For now I will just list the issues:

I'm legally blind due to Retinitis Pigmentosa aka RP aka Tunnel Vision. This is a degenerative eye disease that takes the night vision first (my teens) then a progressive loss of peripheral vision (my twenties with legal blindness reached by age 27) and finally encroaches on the central vision (I've lost so much of the central in my left eye I can no longer read with it and it is closing in on the right as well)

My blood pressure was in the range of 220/120 when I finally started treatment in 2006 which was life threatening not to mention the risk of stroke that could take language from me.  It took a combination of four meds to get it under control and since last August I'd been taking only one or two at any one time as we tried to stretch a month's supply into six weeks or two month's.

I have a mood disorder that includes severe anxiety issues especially social anxiety along with episodes of severe depression.  All of that accompanying severe insomnia to the point I often go days without sleeping at all or weeks with sleeping less than four hours at a time. And the when is all over the clock.  The artist of the cat naps I am.  I went off the meds for this last August and thought I was coping but apparently nobody else thought so and once this latest crisis hit it became obvious to me as well.  The clinic my sister took me to is going to screen me for bi-polar next month before restarting the meds which probably won't be the same ones as before as my sister mentioned that she didn't think they were all that excellent.

I am also overweight by maybe 60-70 pounds now.  I've lost about 50 in the last three years that has come off without going back on.  I've come down from a size 24/26 to a size 18/20.

Additionally I have dizziness and balance issues, joint pain, significant loss of hearing accompanied by loud ringing in the ears and a mouth full of rotten teeth.

My sister is actually excited about the prospect of getting my health overhauled.  I wasn't feeling real cooperative about it at first but am now on board.

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