I Am Overjoyed at How Well the GoFundMe for My Upcoming Dental Surgery Did In Its First Week! — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

About two weeks ago, my wife and I were looking at the paperwork for the financing for the forty-nine thousand dollar dental implant surgery I will be having on June 4th, and I had a thought.

“Should I do a GoFundMe for it?” I asked my wife.

“Might as well. Couldn’t hurt,” was her response.

I felt a little guilty about asking people for money without giving them anything concrete in return, either a book, a material item, or some manner of intense online project requiring an insane, impossible, unsustainable amount of work and research.

Then I thought about it and realized that my wife was right. By having a fundraiser on GoFundMe for my upcoming surgery, I was using the site for its intended purpose: to raise money for worthy causes for broke people who have been failed by the system or fallen through the many holes in what could very generously be called our social safety net, often involving serious medical and dental issues like the one I’m facing.

It’s no exaggeration to say that having this surgery will change my life dramatically and for the better for the rest of my life.

At the risk of being corny or dramatic, I genuinely feel like having this surgery will give me my dignity back. It will make me feel whole. It’s hard to feel complete when you’ve got no teeth. That rhymes, so it must be true.

I hope that other people have better experiences with dentures than I have, but this whole process has been a nightmare.

I lost forty pounds after getting my dentures and have kept them off because eating is no longer a pleasurable experience.

Eating with dentures has been a trial and a chore. It sucks having to do a cost-benefit analysis before you eat a sandwich to ascertain how much chewing would be required and if it’s worth the effort.

I’m already daydreaming about the magical day in the not-too-distant future when I’ll once again be able to enjoy a sandwich.

Eating is the main aspect of my life that has been affected by having dentures instead of real teeth or implants. Dentures also negatively affect how you breathe, sleep, and talk.

Those are pretty important! But the worst part might be that even after fourteen mouths, my stomach and my mind haven’t accepted that the weird plastic things in my mouth are teeth, so I oftentimes feel like throwing up at night if they’re in for too long.

I know a lot of this falls under the rubric of TMI/oversharing, but if you’re asking for money, it’s important to be candid and honest. This hopefully helps explain why I see this very expensive surgery as something that I need to do, as mandatory rather than optional.

I’m glad I launched that campaign because one week later, I have raised over fourteen thousand dollars from hundreds of patrons, many of them anonymous.

One of the reasons I launched my GoFundMe is that we live in a very rich country where many people have a lot of disposable income or money they don’t know what to do with.

These are the people I want to contribute to the GoFundMe. If you’re as broke as I am, don’t even think about throwing in money. If you could share or re-tweet or write something nice that would be wonderful and appreciated and would not cost any money.

I’d had a rough go of it even before I paid thousands of dollars to have all of my rotted and broken teeth removed. I feel like I’ve had a prolonged unlucky streak exacerbated by my neurodivergent impulse towards self-sabotage.

But I really think this GoFundMe's success could turn things around for me and set me on a path that’s more secure, stable, and less terrifying than the one I have been on.

I’ve lost a lot of faith in myself and my judgment, but the GoFundMe's success has given my confidence a much-needed boost.

I still have a ways to go before I hit my goal, and even more until I raise the whole amount but I feel blessed, fortunate and lucky, and it has been a long time since I’ve felt that way.