Tuesday, July 9 Through Thursday, July 25, 2019
Over the weekend, last month’s permanent crown popped off while I was eating. After cleaning it up, I put it in a baggie. The first opportunity to see the dentist was Tuesday afternoon. The first thing I said to the dentist as he was getting ready to look in my mouth was “I think the wisdom tooth has to come out.” But the dentist said no problem. He would use better glue to reattach the crown.
As the dentist was scraping residual glue off the wisdom tooth, the tooth cracked open (along the original hairline crack) all the way down past the gum line exposing the pulp cavity where the nerves live. YES THAT HURT!
Now to be fair, the dentist did tell me there was a 50% chance that the crown wouldn’t work and the tooth would ultimately need to be extracted. It was the hairline crack that increased the risk. Now the tooth had failed and would have to come out.
After six vials of Novocaine (my dentist uses something similar but with fewer side effects) spread over a half hour, my face was still not numb. Six vials is the max. A bad sign.
The plan was to remove the pulp and nerves from the tooth and then extract the tooth in a week giving time for the inflammation to go down. I asked, “How many nerves?” There are three nerve bundles, each in its own tube. I said, “Like a root canal?” He said, “This is not a root canal.” I’m visual so this Tooth Anatomy Diagram has helped me understand what he was up to.
The dentist didn’t say that in a root canal, the tooth’s pulp tissue and nerves are also removed. I suspect that this is the part that causes the pain that people talk about who have had root canal procedures.
An hour later, after suffering through excruciating pain, the procedure was finished off by some dental glue/putty to seal off the top of the hollowed out tooth.
I spent Wednesday and Thursday mornings removing weeds from the narrow strip of dirt between our townhouse foundation and the concrete curb in front of the house. We are talking about having the dirt dug out and replaced with river rock or some other low maintenance cover.
UPS delivered a SimpliSafe monitored alarm system Thursday afternoon and we installed it Friday morning. Installation and configuration took about two hours. It isn’t hard to install, just tedious. So far, SimpliSafe seems like a much better solution than traditional alarm systems. It is also less expensive over time.
Thursday, there was water in a low spot in the street in front of the townhouse. When I told Linda, she reminded me that it had rained hard the night before. Friday evening, after walking the dogs, I noticed the water was still there. In the summer, puddles like that dry up fast. Curious, I opened the access hatch to the water meter. It was full of water. Water had also filled the space under the access hatch to the house’s pressure control valve.
I called the plumber and a dispatcher answered after hours. The plumber arrived within two hours and began working. A solder joint had failed on the pipe between the water meter and the shutoff valve. He finished by 11:00 PM. Thank goodness for plumbers. A few weeks later we received our water bill. It looks like the leak cost us over $100 in lost water in less than two weeks time.
The brick masons arrived early Saturday morning. There were a number of places where the brick mortar was cracked. They ground mortar out from between the bricks and replaced it with mortar of the same color (repointing). They also removed some old ratty looking shelves from the brick wall between the garage and the patio.
Saturday afternoon, our Internet and TV service failed. It came back up but the would fail for a minute or two every few hours. We made a service appointment to get it fixed on Monday.
Sunday we went up to Lowes and bought faucets to replace each of the sink faucets. I realized I needed tools on the first sink. Off to Home Depot to buy tools. They make these weirdly shaped tools to remove faucet bolts (and other things). After getting the sink faucet off and the new one on, it became apparent that we also needed new hoses to connect the valves in cabinets to faucets. All in all, it ended up being a four hardware store trip day. I wasn’t able to remove the old faucet from the pedestal sink so we scheduled a plumber for Wednesday.
Monday, an AT&T repairman arrived. Another installation at a neighbor’s house on Saturday caused intermittent shorts in the wires. The short occurred in the rat’s nest of wires labeled AT&T Equipment above. He wrapped the wires so that the case around the wiring could be removed and reinstalled without shorting out the wires. All good. Everything fixed.
I had a followup appointment with my cardiologist on Wednesday. The cardiologist helped me understand where the heart blockage was and what to expect moving forward. The blockage wasn’t as bad as I thought. The 60% blockage was only in a single artery. It wasn’t widespread as I had feared. However, I am going to have to be more diligent about eating right and exercising.
The plumber came in the afternoon to replace the pedestal sink faucet. It took him over an hour to get the faucet replaced. I’m still not sure how he actually did it. Based on the noises his tools made, it wasn’t an easy process.
Thursday morning was tooth extraction time. After two Novocaine vials didn’t make my lips numb, the dentist changed his Novocaine approach. He told me that dentists are taught a trick to use to help them identify the right injection spot to deaden the nerves. He was sitting on my right. He had me place my left arm up and bend it with my index finger in my left ear. Then he injected the third vial. Immediately, my face went numb. He made a notation in my chart to use the finger in the ear trick on future visits.
To extract the tooth, he alternately drilled the tooth and broke pieces of the tooth off and pulled them out. Soon, the whole tooth was gone. It didn’t hurt much. After the tooth was gone, the bleeding was controlled by biting down on rolled up gauze. After a few hours, the bleeding stopped. I ate soft foods for the following week.
In the first week in July, we had dropped our truck and camper off at PrincessCraft to have the following work items done:
- Replace gas range with Microwave/Convection Oven with Gas Cook Top
- Replace double sink with single sink – deeper sink is better
- Install Backup Camera so that the camera is operational all the time, not just when in reverse.
- Replace bathroom fan with fantastic fan
- Add RV vent covers (Maxxair, Ultra Breeze…) over 2 fan vents
- Install battery monitor – need to know available amp hours in battery (Vectron…)
- Replace RVLock with new RVLock Keyless Entry System
- Lithium Battery Replacement (this one depends on being able to fit enough lithium batteries into available space to provide more than 150 Amp Hours of available storage otherwise we will just replace the existing batteries for approx 100 Amp Hours of available storage)
- Repair Kitchen window – during heavy rains, water leaks into interior through window frame. We caulked around the window as an emergency repair a year ago. Window is now leaking again.
The Lithium Battery Replacement ended up costing too much so we opted for just replacing the lead acid batteries instead. All the work has been completed except the sink replacement. A new candidate replacement sink had been found but it was a quarter inch too large. Back to the drawing board.
On Wednesday, July 24, we left San Antonio in the Exploder (2010 Ford Explorer) for St. Louis. Since we had plans for St. Louis on Friday, we did the drive in two days instead of three. Linda helped some with the driving.
The car keeps track of fuel mileage. This is the first time I’ve seen it hit this high. 21 MPG! Pretty good for an old car. My late brother Tom would said emphatically “This is a low mileage car!” since it only has 90,000 miles on it.
Hope to see you on the road ahead!