Ouch..ouch….pain…For some reason, my teeth started to hurt last night. It felt like something was stuck in between one of my teeth and it jammed on the other teeth, created pressures around it. I couldn’t floss through it. Every time I bite down, there was a sharp pain coming from my nerve. After a long sleepless night, I decided to pay my dentist a visit.

As I have mentioned before, I had a lot of problems with the dentists here. I already switched a couple dentists and each one charges me more money than the previous. My insurance doesn’t help much either. USC staff gets to have union paid dental insurance, which is free to us, but it’s dental HMO plan, which a lot of dentists don’t accept. The plan doesn’t cover a lot of procedures too. So I tried to avoid dentist unless I have to.

Well today is the occasion I felt I had to go. I made an emergency appointment this morning.  The dentist first thought I grind my teeth at night and caused the pain. But after several minute of trying to pull the floss through, she decided to go for a high tech instrument. She first gave me anesthesia shot. Then she asked the nurse to bring a metal box with a small drill connected on it and started drilling in between the gaps of my problem teeth. Amazingly, whatever was stuck disappeared. The pain was gone and I could easily floss through again!  This whole treatment took about 20 minute.

Then when it came to payment, they told me my emergency visit co-payment is freakin’ $90!!! $90 for 20 minute of simple treatment?? I really should’ve read my insurance policy before going in, but I had no choice but paid the money.  They also kept on asking me about that $4000 onlay treatment that I’m supposed to do. All I wanted is get the hell out of this money sucking place, so I continued to stall them and told them I’m not ready yet.

After all those painful lessons, now I know having healthy teeh is very very important!! I hope I never have to go back to dentist again!