It's a pain in the tooth!

Today I'm going for a consultation on dental implants.

I thought I wasn't worried about it, but when I laid awake for hours and hours last night, my stomach churning, thinking about, it occurred to me:  Hey, you're worried about this.

The biggest worry is the cost.  Six grand BARE MINIMUM.  Who has that kind of change to toss around?

Another:  bone grafts.  That's a scary one.  Did you hear about the funeral homes that were illegally harvesting tissue (like bone for grafts) from the dead--especially the dead who died of cancer or communicable diseases--like HIV??? Well, guess what--some of that stuff happened right here in my home town.

Hey, I'm a mystery writer.  I think the worst about everything, so naturally I don't have a lot of confidence about where this graft is going to come from, no matter what they tell me.  (Oh, they might use synthetic bone (anyone ever heard of that?) or bovine.  (Mooooooo!))

A friend of mine had a bone graft that--OOPS--didn't take.  One tooth ended up costing him over FIVE THOUSAND dollars.

(My insurance isn't going to cover much of this procedure, either.)

I have to admit, after over 30 years of dental mishaps, I'm not the trusting young girl I once was.  In fact, it seems to me that the last four dentists I've worked with have done nothing but rip out and replace the work the previous dentist did, all at tremendous cost.  Some of the work has been really good.  Some not.

I'm not sure why I'm going to go to this consultation.  I've pretty much made up my mind that implants are not going to happen.  (And it's going to cost me just to show up.)  I want to believe that if I spent that kind of money, that everything would be good, great, wonderful, and I'll never have a problem with those "teeth" again.  My own dental history tells me this just is not true.

What are your dental experiences?