My Published Articles for ViewsHound: Going to the Dentist is a Pain in the Butt and in the Pocket

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Going to the Dentist is a Pain in the Butt and in the Pocket

Citrus Heights Dental Patients Waiting Area

According to the Web in 2015 the average tooth removals cost is $75 to $300 for non-surgical, gum-erupted tooth extraction, $150 to $650 for a surgical extraction utilizing anesthesia and $185 to $600 for soft-tissue and complicated surgical extractions. It is very important to select a Dentist who will not overcharge you specially if you do not have dental insurance. My Federal Medical Insurance do not cover my Dental needs.

A couple of months ago, I broke four teeth that is supporting my lower denture( partial). It was not aching so I did not go to the dentist. However, yesterday one of my four teeth started aching showing signs of infection. I called several dental offices in the area, but only one could accommodate me within 24 hours. This office is the Citrus Heights Dental-a private group practice. The four teeth (lower left) extraction cost me over a $1000 even after my 10% senior discount. The office normally do not give discount, but I charmed the office manager for the discount by promising to write a good review of my visit.

I went to the Citrus Heights Dental for evaluation for my lower denture repair last September. I have also an upper denture and I am very happy with it. I informed the office I just want the lower denture repair or replace. As a new patient I had free X'ray of my whole mouth and Evaluation( Office Promotion). After the 30 minutes consultation, I was told my lower denture can not be repaired. I was told I need a complete mouth repair including a new upper denture at a cost of over $6000 even after a 10% senior discount. I will have all my remaining teeth ( 6) extracted. Needless to say, I went out of the dental office in a hurry. I felt that the dentist who saw me is pressuring me for more dental work that I really do not need. I went to the Internet and found the following reviews for Citrus Heights Dental.

Latest Review #1: The staff was good and friendly and all. It's the dentist that sucked. Long story short; I had a tooth ache, they x-rayed and she looked in my mouth for literally about 15 seconds and said I needed a root canal, post and a crown. Cost was 2500. I called BS and got another opinion from another dentist and after a more through examination, I was told all I needed was the crown. Cost about 1000. This place is unscrupulous and dishonest. I will never go back.( One Star)

Latest Review #2: I lost a portion of the bridge and was forced to get it replaced. I had no insurance and certainly didn't have the money to pay upfront for the work but this place was absolutely as accommodating as they could be with the payments. Now let's talk about the doctors and the assistants. I was sitting there with missing teeth and some pretty tough cosmetic work needing done. But when I left I had a temporary bridge in place that looked phenomenal! Talk about being happy smile again!! It was definitely a long session but the staff tried to make me as comfortable as possible and that included laughing when we could. I would recommend this location in a heartbeat! (Five Star)

Latest Review #3: I will never come back to this dental office. All they do is to pressure you on adding for service. My husband went in for a regular cleaning and half way thru the cleaning. The hygienist said she doesn't know how to clean his teeth unless he paid her more using the laser which will cost another $100+ dollars. She has done this so many times. He didn't want to argue with her. So this will be the last time he's coming back here. I'm canceling all my appointments also because I think they only think about money and not treat their patients as real customers.( One Star)

Latest Review #4: I woke up on a Tuesday morning with a terrible toothache. I had to call and make an emergency appointment at 4:30 P.M. They were able to get me in at 5:30. The office was easy to find and the staff was super helpful. The dentist was good and the exam ended with having to have my wisdom tooth pulled. The extraction took minimal time and I had zero complications afterwards. No swelling and very little pain. I HATE going to the dentist but I have found a place that has made me comfortable.( Four Star)

My Personal Review: I gave this place a four star. The office manager assigned me to a new dentist. He pulled my four teeth with professional expertise. I went home with prescriptions of antibiotics and Tylenol and a mouth wash. Today is the second day after the extraction and I feel good except for a pain in my pocket.

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Going to the Dentist is a Pain in the Butt and in the Pocket

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