I have spent $5000 on dentistry in the last two years.
And I’ve got a hell of a lot more left to go.
CW for suicide ideation and description of teeth stuff.
If you’re new here, I’m Emma. I’m 25. At the end of 2019, I got tooth pain that was so bad that I finally had to bite the bullet and go to the dentist.
After six years of not going.
The last time I went to the dentist before that was in 2014.
It was about a week before my eighteenth birthday. I knew it was the last time I’d be going for a while. Fear didn’t keep me from going back after I turned eighteen — it was the price.
There’s this joke that a lot of people I know make, which is essentially thus, “If I ignore it and it gets better, then I’m fine. If I die, then I die.” It’s less of a joke and more of a statement, really. I had been experiencing tooth pain on and off all through uni, and ignoring it. Thought it was my sinuses. Hoped it was my sinuses.
Thought it would go away.
It didn’t.
In late January 2020 I had my first tooth pulled out. A molar. Y’know, one of the ones you actually need. A few months later, after dosing myself to high hell on painkillers through the first lockdown (I was eating pain pills like candy and thus stoned out of my gourd), I had the same molar on the opposite side pulled out. Later that year, I lost a third — one of the back wisdoms (and that one required cutting into the bone and stitches), and then early last year a 4th.
I sincerely hope I won’t lose a fifth.
My teeth are in a state. It’s not for any particular dental hygiene issue — I’m just genetically predisposed to have bad teeth, and jaw tightness makes me more likely to crack them — something I didn’t learn until a couple of years back. Severe depression and teeth cleaning also don’t go together all that well and for a few months in 2018, I was severely depressed.
My teeth are in a state that could have been mitigated if I’d gone to the dentist earlier. I almost definitely wouldn’t have lost as many teeth as I have, and I would not be paying out as much as I am right now.
“But Emma!” You scream, “Why didn’t you just go earlier?”
Because I could. Not. Afford. It.
Sure. Dentists have student pricing. Dentists have deals.
$55 when you’re a student living on scraps is not a deal. It’s not cheap. It’s not something that comes to the forefront of your mind when you’re tossing up between getting to uni or eating that week, when you’ve graduated and you’re unemployed, or you’re getting paid $300 a week and your rent is $220.
You take your painkillers and you make your pain go away, and you hope you don’t die in the process.
That’s how it’s always been.
Have you ever had extreme dental pain? It’s ranked up there as one of the worst pains in the world, and it gets worse at night because increased blood flow to your brain increases pressure on your tooth.
It’s also a pain that is very hard to stop. You can take painkillers, pop a cold or hot pack on the jaw, but it still stays. Even opioids mightn’t make a dent in it.
Let me tell you a little story about the time I nearly killed myself.
It was March last year. I had a broken leg, was essentially confined to my house, and it was the middle of the New Zealand Fringe Festival. It’s funny, the pointless things you remember when they’re outlined by pain.
I was dealing with a toothache, but it wasn’t major. I was putting it off because it was Fringe, I had very little money and I wasn’t exactly ambulatory enough to deal with getting from my house, to the dentist, and back again.
So I waited.
And in the middle of the night one night the pain flared up worse than anything I’ve felt before. Look, I know pain. I’d broken my leg in two places just over a month before. I’ve had ovarian cysts explode, cluster headaches and PCOS period pain. I have six chronic conditions; pain is less of an enemy than a slightly irritating acquaintance.
This was an entirely different beast. Dental pain throbs. It lingers, it creeps into your head and down your spine. It’s persistent, and pervasive. It becomes all that you are.
I couldn’t walk about, I couldn’t stand, there was nothing I could do. I took variations of every painkiller I had on hand, and not just the light stuff. Nothing would dull it. Cold pads, heating pads, nothing. I was in agony, clutching my jaw and writhing on my bed. Nothing would fix it, and nothing was working.
For the first, and only, time in my life, I contemplated suicide. Clinically, I have depression, but I’d never gone that far before. This was something else.
The pain was inescapable and there was zero I could do.
This is not something I’ve ever told anyone before, but I came very, very close that night.
After a few hours of drifting in a haze of too many pills, somehow I managed to shift at least some of the pain away, and I dozed off, out of my mind with exhaustion. I went to the dentist that afternoon and they gave me antibiotics. I didn’t quite have a dental abscess, but if I’d left it a day or two more I would have.
There was one day during the New Zealand Fringe Festival last year that I told my cast that I couldn’t perform that night cause of teeth pain. Downplayed it a bit, made a couple of jokes.
It was the day after that endless, endless night.
These days, I work fulltime. I put roughly half of my paycheck into a bank account each fortnight marked “Dentist”. I go to the dentist every eight weeks or so, spend an hour and a bit lying in that chair and feel my face go numb and a good chunk of money flow from my bank account.
Usually it’s about $700, but I’ve definitely got a root canal coming up, so that will come to about $3000 for one procedure that might not even stick. This is money that I really can’t afford to lose, but I do it anyway, because I have zero desire to feel that same pain again.
I have to take gaps between each appointment, as I’m not made of money, and as I sit here with a tooth actively rotting in my mouth and pain aching through my jaw and down my shoulder, I wonder what could have been.
My dentist is lovely. I like her a lot. We have great chats. She is resolutely not the problem here.
Dentistry in this country is obscenely expensive. I know multiple folk who have travelled overseas for their dentistry because it is cheaper to travel overseas, stay somewhere overnight, get several dental procedures done and then travel back.
While the government increased the emergency dental grant (available through WINZ) from $300 to $1000 in the 2022 Budget, this grant is hard to get and is not good enough. This is a drop in the bucket for most long-term dentistry and will fix maybe half a tooth, if that.
The New Zealand Labour Party dominates the government currently, and will do so for at least another year. This is the exact time to enact meaningful change in the dentistry field, to support the teeth of our population in the long run, by heavily subsidizing dental or making it free.
If there’s one policy that would make the hundreds of thousands of folk in NZ with shit teeth happy — it’d be that one.
But I doubt it will happen. Why push for significant, important change when bowing to the middle ground is good enough? If you ignore the thousands of people with dental issues, maybe they’ll just go away. It’s easier than writing policy, anyway.
It is downright abhorrent to me that this issue continues to rear its ugly head. I am unbelievably disappointed in the state of our political system that those that govern us believe that teeth are unimportant. It is sickening behaviour, and unbelievably devoid of empathy to believe that New Zealand has a functioning health system when teeth (and eyes) are considered a luxury good.
Every time I talk to my friends about dentistry, I stress the need for prevention. I don’t want them to end up like me, paying money into an endless well for God knows how long, then starting the cycle all over again.
Y’know what I usually hear back?
“I’ll get onto it when I can/when I’ve paid off my other debts/when I get a full time job.”
Which is about what I expect.
- Why put aside hundreds of dollars when you need that money more immediately?
- Why prioritize your teeth over rent, or transport, or food?
It’ll go away.
And if it doesn’t, I guess we’ll all just take some Ibuprofen, put a cold pad up to our cheeks, and hope it doesn’t get worse.
We’ll really, really hope.
Because the alternative is worse.
