Paying For The Sin Of My Stubborness

ME???!!! Stubborn???

Perhaps. I prefer to think of it as being focused on the most straightforward solution and keeping things simple.

For example, fixing the tooth that I broke back in May or June. At that time we had no idea that we would be moving soon and playing 52-pickup with our routines and lives. Broken tooth = visit to my usual dentist = start treatment with a couple of necessary but undesirable surgeries.

Then came the move.

Do we have a new dentist up here? No. Do we have a recommendation? No. Do we know of anyone in our dental plan so we don’t have to pay 100% out of pocket? No.

So my solution for the last three necessary dental visits was to just go back to my usual dentist who had started the procedures. The only real downside was the 100-mile round trip to get to her.

It seemed to be the easier of the two paths. The more simple one.

The third and final post-move appointment was for last Wednesday. But the dentist woke up feeling ill. The good news was that her office called nice and early to cancel & reschedule, since they knew I was driving in from up in the mountains in the next county over. (Or maybe it’s two counties over…) The bad news is that her office called nice and early to cancel & reschedule, while I was still asleep. They gave me a new time and date and I grunted like a semi-conscious chimpanzee.

Today was that rescheduled date. The day before Thanksgiving. One of the busiest travel days of the year on the LA freeway system. And I’m voluntarily doing a 100+ mile round trip.

Surprisingly, and I’m grateful, the trip “down the hill” was a piece of cake, one of the fastest and most traffic congestion free of the dozen-plus that I’ve done in this whole “moving to the High Desert” process of the past six months. About 1:50 total, and there were good tunes on SiriusXM.

Coming back home at about 14:00 when EVERYONE IN THE FREAKING CITY WAS HITTING THE ROAD TO GET A JUMP ON TRAFFIC AND GET TO GRAMMIE’S AND THE TURKEY? That might have been more of a trial and a tribulation. Closer to 5:00 with multiple stretches where I didn’t go eight or ten miles in an hour, and the only saving grace in going the “back route” up over the mountains instead of the “straight route” on the freeways was that my map and GPS apps kept reassuring me that the long way around was actually an hour or more faster than the freeway route.

Okay, but that’s a lot of time sitting still with a sore tooth, hungry, thirsty, needing a nap, and having time to think about life, the Universe, and everything. And as Crash Davis so correctly taught us, “Don’t think! It can only hurt the team!”

So, I’m finally home, I finally got to the bathroom, and the adventure of this tooth is finally over!

Except…

Looking at the final X-rays, as the dentist finished up, she showed me where there are signs of new cavities growing on nearby teeth. When I *DO* find a new dentist up here (and don’t put that off), just have them contact her for copies of the old records and X-rays.

Great!