Accepting the Blessing Given

 

It has been a bad year in my mouth.

I may or may not have mentioned that in the spring I had fillings revised (removed and replaced) in 3 quadrants of my mouth.  (And then went and had a physical with my new doctor, while still all numb and unable to speak intelligibly or intelligently.  That was awesome.)

In Park City at the beginning of July I cracked a tooth.  The ‘nice big hole in the back of your mouth’ kind of crack.  A few days later when we were in Rexburg I found a nice dentist to patch the hole for me.  He was very impressed and told me to expect a root canal (along with a new crown) when I got home.

For this reason I was super excited when I got home and my dentist got started on my new crown and said he didn’t think I was going to need a root canal.

I was excited, that is, until during the week after the temporary crown was put on I realized that I couldn’t chew.  At all.  Not on the sore temporary crown, and not, as it turned out, on the other side either.

When I went back to get the temporary crown switched for the real crown, the dentist asked carefully about all of my symptoms, concerned that I might be in that small category of people with cracked teeth that just end up needing a root canal.  He was happy with all of my answers, until I said,

“There’s just one thing.  I hadn’t realized until now that I wasn’t chewing at all on the other side, and I can’t.  It hurts when I do.”

His face fell.

“That, my friend,” he said, “Is not what I wanted to hear.”

After a quick test he was positive that I had yet another cracked tooth.  (And decided that while I may not be grinding my teeth at night, I must certainly be gritting them, thus causing all of the cracking.)

A couple of weeks later I met him again at his office for another crown.   He decided while he was working that the reason for the pain was actually not that the tooth was cracked, but that the nerve was going bad.  And that it would need a root canal. 

Have you ever cried at the dentist’s office?  I came close that day, especially when the office manager told me that I had almost certainly used up my entire major dental benefit for the year already, that she wasn’t sure how much of this crown would be covered, and that I was probably going to have to pay out of pocket for the root canal which would most certainly be around $1000. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When my dentist got down to the root of the problem (which was the root of the tooth) he was worried.  Very worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get into the endodontist before the tooth started causing me enormous pain.  Worried enough that he sent the assistant out to call the endodontist’s office right then to make the appointment, assuming that a dental assistant calling from his office would be able to make an appointment sooner than a regular person like me would.

She came back and told me that my appointment was set for 6 days from then.  And then they warned me about the pain, and told me they would give me any medication I needed for the pain, and to call ANYTIME if there was pain, and on and on. 

I was a bit worried.

But I had no pain.  Not a bit.

They even called me two days later to make sure I wasn’t in terrible pain.  I said no, I was fine.

 

Tuesday morning I got to go see the endodontist.  She was very good with the novicane needle and spent a long time drilling in my mouth.  It turns out that this particular back molar has four roots, and that mine are pretty curvy—one of them even makes (made?) a 90 degree turn, which was difficult for her to navigate.  But she did it.

We ran out of time, though, because the roots were so complicated.  (And let’s be honest—because I had a hard time finding her office, probably because I really didn’t want to find it.  In fact I almost got a stent placed instead of a root canal!)

Her assistant came in with three ibuprofen and they went through the pain discussion again.  I should take three ibuprofen now. I should take three ibuprofen every 6 hours, no matter what.  If that wasn’t enough for the pain, I should take three ibuprofen and a tylenol at the same time.  And if that wasn’t enough, here was a prescription for some percocet, just in case. 

And then I went out, made my return appointment for early October, and let the nice receptionist charge my credit card approximately $1325 for the fun of the day.  Oh, and by the way, turns out that the dentists office manager was right; I had to pay for $836 of the $1036 of the second crown.

 

I took the ibuprofen offered in the office, and then took three more later in the day.  I felt nothing more than a little mild soreness which seemed to be about par for the course I’d had that day.  I kept waiting for the awful, percocet needing pain, but it never came.  Still hasn’t.

 

What I have felt instead was the financial pain.  Not really the pain of not having the money to pay for all of this dental work.  More the pain of not expecting to pay for it, and really not wanting to pay for it.  This frustration has gone round and round in my mind, just like the hamster on it’s wheel.  (Equally squeaky, also keeping me up at night.)

Why, I wondered to myself, could Heavenly Father not postpone all this additional dental work?  Until next year, when my dental insurance would pay for it again.  Why did it have to happen so far away from next year so that it wasn’t possible for me to just wait and have it done?  Why did we have to pay so much money right now when the stock market is down and Russ has to take days off without pay and when I didn’t want to have to use our money in this way?!?

 

And then, in the middle of my mental muddle, I felt the spirit give me a gentle but firm nudge.

“Having had no pain is a tender mercy from Heavenly Father.  Accept what he has given you, appreciate it, and stop wishing for something else.”

 

I was startled.  I knew that everyone expected me to have pain.  A lot of pain.  A percocet amount of pain.  And I was really glad not to have had it.  But I was so busy being irritated by the financial part of it that I didn’t even stop to appreciate the mercy in being pain free.  I never considered that the pain could conceivably have been bad enough that I would have been thrilled to pay my $2000 just to make it go away.

 

I think the take home lesson for me today is this:  Don’t be so busy being frustrated with what isn’t that you miss what is.  And then be grateful for the mercy that has been given.