2021 in Review Part III: Same Old: Same. Old.

[captainsblog]

As time ticks down, it seemed a good opportunity to write about time ticking down. As the tag line for that earlier George Lucas saga hypothetically asked:



Still here, is the most important thing.  Getting to this number means I've achieved numerological parity with my favorite team. For the Mets began play in '62, and played it historically badly.  We'll get to their more present pursuits probably tomorrow.  Still, I've made it into the "ten" of the proverbial "threescore and ten" that was considered standard for our make and model.

I've had my annual general checkup, and my decennial view from Down Under, and both reported me to be well.  Eleanor had her five year post-cataract visit to the opthamologist, which reported all was okay with her, and it prompted me to make my own appointment with them to see how many years I might have before that. Answer: at least a few. I'm having the most trouble with up-close reading these days, and rarely wear glasses for anything other than driving because the restriction's on my license.

Weight and routine are about the same. I still try to make it in twice a week for a very intense more-or-less hour of high intensity training, and I've kept up with the occasional benchmarks and other challenges they throw at us.  The dog also makes sure I'm out walking on a daily basis, with longer ones on Sundays with other now and former furparents.  Eleanor has more limits because of her more prolonged pains, but she's adapted to them and still keeps pretty active, inside the house if not outside it.

One area I know I lost weight in, though, was in my mouf, for 2021 brought down another tooth.

----

It was supposed to be a routine cleaning back in March, and I wasn't in any pain. But it was x-ray time, and they uncovered a party in my mouth that needed to be shut down, going on under a crown that I'd had for years and my dentist had managed to reattach a year the previous summer after it came off (fortunately without me swallowing it). A closer inspection showed there was no hope of fixing the remaining stubby underneath, and the only solution was for it to come out....

which it did, a few weeks later. It's just beyond the range of being visible, but we talked about whether an implant would be an option. Since it really wasn't financially, I checked with the UB Dental School to see if they could do anything. They brought me in for an initial consult, sent me back to Ron for full x-rays and a full-mouth wax impression, and I then brought them back to UB for a more thorough sit-down. It confirmed that spot would not be right for an implant, but as long as the (additional) hole in my head wasn't causing me pain or inconvenience, I was best off leaving it alone.  Which I did, until about a month later I started feeling pain there again.  Another visit scheduled, and the culprit was identfied....

I was teething. Specifically, a bit of bone under the gum line wasn't completely happy with the new arrangements and was fighting its way out. It took about 30 seconds of drilling to fix it.  That's 30 seconds longer than how my latest complaint got fixed: a month or so after my last cleaning got me a clean bill of dental health, I started feeling a weird but duller pain in that same back corner, but it went away before I could even do anything about it.  Ultimately, all of these horrible teeth are likely to go, but it's good to have the problem off my plate (or palate, I suppose) for the time being.

----

Other than that, it's just the usual aches and pains of being a year older.  Nothing stopping me from working or working out, and I don't have any specialists on the team yet as Eleanor does. Just three more years to the joys of Medicare.

Comments

[platypus]

I had a crown break off in mid-December 2020. It was a 22-year old crown on a tooth that could barely support it to begin with, so the the bits of tooth left were clearly doomed. It was the last tooth in back on the bottom, a place where it’s desirable to get an implant if possible, lest the tooth above it also come to a bad ending.

A year later, we're still working on the implant. The specialist involved only works at my dentist's office once a month, so every difficulty put me a month behind; the first appointment he cancelled due to illness, then I didn’t want to schedule it on my birthday, and finally in February the remnants of my ex-tooth were removed and I got a bone graft. It needed a few months to heal before the implant could be placed, and I was supposed to have that done in summer, only to discover (twice) that I was inadequately pre-medicated and my anxiety was prohibitive. I declined to schedule another try on the day our new library system launched, being responsible for significant parts of the proceedings, so lost another month. I FINALLY had the implant placed in October, with no crown yet (and Pretty Good Drugs); now it’s healing again, and may be ready for a post and crown in February (once again, I would not schedule it on my birthday in January), but looking at the skyrocketing covid numbers, perhaps we may as well say March…