CAREGIVING: Tuesday I took Kathy to the dentist to have those fillings taken care of. Only problem was I got the day wrong. I got her up early. Gave her a shower. Got her bathroom chores out of the way, so she wouldn’t feel like she had to go there. Fed her breakfast. Cleaned her teeth really, really well. Got her and her chair down the stairs and into the RAV. We arrived on time; but on the wrong day. Wrong week, too! My bad. Later I looked to try to figure out where I had screwed up and never figured it out. I think I tried to put it into google calendar on my little phone with my fat fingers.
It worked out fine though. They weren’t busy and the dentist took us right in. He numbed her up, and got to work. Since Kathy has Huntington’s he is trying to keep her from going through a lot of dental work. In a perfect world she would need crowns to fix a broken tooth and a filling that is held in with some sort of pins (based on the x-rays). But doing state of the art cosmetic work on a patient that has Kathy’s health issues doesn’t make a lot of sense. He had creative solutions, though. The one chipped filling he simply smoothed over. The broken tooth he built up the rough side where it was broken with white colored filling material. It was interesting to watch him apply it and then it gets cured instantly with a bright blue light. Apparently it is sensitive to a narrow wavelength of blue light and that is what hardens it. The other tooth that is trickier is an upper tooth. It has a huge filling in it that appears to be held in with pins or wires or something. The filling itself is OK but he can’t tell if there might be some decay underneath it. He still had not received her old x-rays from my dentist which might tell if that decay shadow is unchanged or something new. For the time being he wants me to try to keep that area really clean. That one would really need a crown if he had to remove the filling.
I had ordered an Oral-B electric toothbrush that arrived Wednesday and I put it to work right away. But one of the things I’m using that really helps are GUM go-betweens. The fine ones work great on some of the tight spaces. The dentist sold me some prescription fluoride toothpaste. I put a little on one of the brushes and brush it into the spaces that he is worried about. The hygienist had suggested that I clean Kathy’s teeth while she is in her chair and from behind. It works really well if you are a caregiver. If you think how the dentist and the hygienist work on you from behind and above it starts to make sense. I did a little research on the electric toothbrush and picked a battery driven Oral-B because the action was closer to the round brush that the dentist uses. I decided not to get a rechargeable fancy kind because those batteries fart out after a while and you can’t replace them. So it makes more sense to buy rechargeable batteries. I go through cordless phones and dustbusters because the batteries are hard to replace. Kathy seems to like the toothbrush. I need to get more replacement heads so I can try it too. For now I’m still using a regular brush.