Petunia rambles on and on….

How about these for quick Christmas gifts?

These are Mom’s Cabled Mitts and no, not me MOM, somebody else came up with these. They take worsted weight yarn, and I’m sure I’ve got plenty. Sorry – gotta go stash diving.

I survived another couple hours in the dentist’s chair, I am all “bolted together” now, and my husband called me “Frankenmouth.”  I am mulling over appropriate ways to get back at him for that!

I also have a February Lady Sweater blocking, a shawl done and ready for blocking. That’s going to be a problem – well, the poodle is the problem. Pinning things down on the floor at the level of a bounding, brainless Standard Poodle is going to be a problem. She’s dumb enough to eat the pins. On my list of chores is clear out enough space back in my craft room to pin the shawl down in there. I can then shut her out! With the holidays approaching, the list of chores stretches from here to the North Pole. Not sure where on my list this chore should fall.  If I’m going to give this shawl as a holiday gift, it probably needs to be blocked before Christmas Eve! If it’s not going out as a gift, it can move further down the list and hold ’til January!

And I’m knitting on a sweater for Pop

And I have plenty of pictures of the darlings.

Remember this one?? Should I post it over on Facebook?  I think I will!

so it ain’t my fault. I inherited it. I would rather have inherited vast quantities of money or large bosoms, but it didn’t work out that way.  Instead, oh, lucky me!!,  I inherited bad teeth and an unnatural fear of dentists. (It is really, really bad when those two traits inhabit the same person) This may have been brought on by Ray’s dental work. Ray is the older brother, put on earth for the sole purpose of making sure I was terrified every day of my childhood. Oh, you who used to sneak outside and make noises outside my bedroom window while I tried to sleep. You who would break limbs off of the trees and drag them across the side of the house so they made screeching noises late at night. No wonder I have a chronic sleep disorder.

Anyway, when we were kids, Mom decided to get Ray’s teeth fixed. He is 6 years older than me, and also inherited lousy teeth – I can still remember him going by himself to the dentist one day a week, every week, after school for about 300 years. They drilled and filled, and scraped, did root canals, put caps on and tortured and used thousands of needles that were all 4 feet long – hey, that’s what he told me!! He was in pain and feared the dentist most of his childhood, and when he told the tale to me, he added a bit to the truth, so that I was even more freaked out than he was.  (And the upshot of all this was that much of the work done was ripped out shortly after he went in the Army!!)

Because I’m such a freak, any dental work I’ve ever had done has been done while I was under anesthetic, knocked out. I did once talk a doctor who was going to knock me out to pull wisdom teeth into doing the fillings while I couldn’t kick him and run. That was in Panama, it was a military doctor, they needed the practice (Oh, God!!) and agreed to do it. Other than that, my only option was to wait until the teeth were bad enough, go to an oral surgeon and have them pulled.  This is not practicing good dentistry, but the oral surgeons that can knock you out usually won’t do “routine” dental care, and those that will do cleanings and fillings aren’t licensed to knock the patients into next week – which is where I need to be, or I kick and leave. 

I had the entire top pulled when I was 22, all the upper teeth. Trust me, I didn’t do this out of boredom, or because I didn’t have a date for this coming Saturday and was looking for something to occupy my time. I was driven there by pain, and accumulated absences at work, because it’s damn hard to work, talk on the phone clearly, when your face is swollen up like a pumpkin. I was Telephone Company, and Ma Bell back in the day would not tolerate either indistinct speech or more than 5 absences a year!! Ma Bell was a real bitch. So as I couldn’t keep missing work, I was forced to it. The oral surgeon I saw didn’t initially want to pull all the teeth; wanted me to have them fixed instead, because I was so young. I got a quote for the work that needed to be done, and it was the equivalent of  2 years of take-home pay!!  TWO years worth! And dental insurance hadn’t been invented yet! They wanted 3 times more than I had paid for my BRAND-NEW CAR!!!  I was also told that even if I went ahead and had all that work done, there would then be “maintainence” issues.  I would need to continue pouring money into dentist’s offices or it would all go south again. The doctor finally agreed to pull the teeth. Never have regretted that decision.  They also pulled quite a few molars on the bottom

So it’s the bottom teeth that I’ve been dealing with forever for months. I decided that I had best deal with the dental issues now while 1) I was still working and had a decent income, and 2) before I was in great pain and forced into making poor decisions for quick solutions. I sought out oral surgeons and prosthodontists, talked to many, chose one of each. All that I talked to agreed that the only thing that will work well for me was dental implants, a vicious idea thought up by madmen modern way of securing a lower denture and a method particularly recommended when teeth have been missing for an extended period of time. If the gums and lower jaw are not “weight-bearing” they lose mass. Yes, I know that few have worked their jaws as much as I have but that apparently doesn’t count here. 

And as these doctors consult and talk about this procedure, I’m trying to find a way to burrow out of the office through the floor. The initial plan was lengthy, involved and would take a long time. Remove teeth, stitch and allow that to heal. Expose jawbone from side to side, drill pilot holes into jaw bone, place titanium pins into bone; stitch and allow to heal. Open the whole freaking inside up again and expose the pins that were previously covered, and put little cap-thingies on them, stitch and allow it to heal. Each healing time is a minimum of 3 months. AND TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, on the initial x-rays, it was discovered that I had a jawbone that had healed, re-healed and probably 3 times fractured, never properly set. Another conference here on what to do about that. During first procedure, that was all corrected, evened out, ground down, whatever.  (I was WAY OUT for that procedure!!!!) And that was the one where I reacted to the Percocet painkiller – who knew??

So I’m near the end of it.  Almost. 15 months of running to doctors. Haven’t had this many medical appointments since I was pregnant. Today I spent several hours at the prosthodontist’s office as they made impressions and put lots of icky-tasting stuff in my mouth. Several times.  Then I was sent out to waste 2 hours of time, to make sure everything is “sitting where we want it.” Then back to the office where everything is checked and double checked. And tomorrow at 9am, I go back again. The healing caps will be removed. Some “snap” sort of thing will be placed on the top of the implants. The other part of the “snap” is inside the denture.  SNAP! In place. Secure. Go laugh! Go eat an apple! Go order a Filet Mignon! Have a few beers, laugh some more, LOUDLY! And grin!