CAREGIVING: Kathy has been due to go to the dentist for a while. Her last appointment was in March and they found two fillings that needed to be replaced. The estimate was $600 dollars but when the appointment came there was no way Kathy could keep still long enough to have anything done so I postponed it for a few months. Then when she was given MassHealth coverage I received a booklet saying she could get dental care as part of it. It would mean switching from the dental office she has gone to since we moved here in 1988. But then again that dentist had retired and the practice was taken over by a younger dentist.While I still like it there a lot, 600 just seemed expensive. But I had nothing to compare it to either.
So I decided to look into MassHealth and found a dentist in East Longmeadow, who takes MassHealth. Kathy agreed to do whatever I thought. And today was our first appointment for a cleaning, x-rays and an initial review. The office is pretty amazing looking inside considering it used to be the old post office in town. As a graphic designer I loved the retro dental posters on the wall advertising tooth powder and french tooth paste. The staff was amazing and didn’t seem phased by a huntington’s disease patient in a transport chair. The dental hygienist was very nice and asked how long Kathy had been showing symptoms. I started to explain about HD and say she was born with it. So it is hard to say exactly. It turned out she was quite familiar with Huntington’s Disease. Her mother’s friend has it. She started showing symptoms 15 years ago.
I felt really confident that Kathy’s teeth were really pretty clean. I was cleaning them, after all. I asked the hygienist how I was doing. She brought me over to show me something. She gently pulled out Kathy’s lips to show me that parts of Kathy’s breakfast was still wedged into little “vestibules” inside her cheeks, high above and down below her teeth. So I wasn’t even looking there. She showed me how to wrap strips of gauze around my finger to wipe the food out. The dentist came in after the cleaning and x-rays were done. He was really nice too. He feels like he can fix a couple of the teeth pretty easily. One is broken off the side and he can put some white filling material to smooth it. The other will take longer but because it is right next to the other tooth he can replace the filling at the same time as the first tooth. We are worried that the water used to cool the drill may cause her to choke. But we will have to play it by ear. He is more worried about an upper molar that has a huge filling held in with some sort of pins. He said Kathy will require a little creativity because of the types of work she had done. He thought that one had some decay underneath it but he couldn’t tell for sure without seeing earlier x-rays. So I have to see if I can get those. Kathy was very calm considering and now she tells me if she feels food inside her cheeks like a chipmunk.
