I Love My New Teeth!
Around two months ago I had a dental surgery that changed my life dramatically, and for the better. I’d had dentures for about a year at that point that made me miserable. I hated them! Having dentures made me feel old and sad and feeble. It made me feel like a failure.
I don’t want to shame anyone who is in the position that I was in three months ago. I just know that for me, having dentures resulted in a massive decrease in self-esteem and quality of life, and I wasn’t exactly the picture of happiness before my dentures.
Thankfully, dentures were only a temporary measure and not a new permanent reality. My dental implants cost around fifty thousand dollars. That’s a ridiculous amount of money, but it’s worth it.
I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the GoFundMe I set up to help pay for the surgery. It means the world to me that strangers were willing to pony up cold hard cash just to help me with a problem that I feel overwhelmingly responsible for.
Getting dental implants instantly and dramatically improved my quality of life and self-esteem. I’m nowhere near confident, let alone cocky, but my self-esteem and my confidence both received massive boosts from dental implants.
I feel young and attractive, whereas I used to feel old and repulsive. I no longer have terrible teeth that fill me with shame, the way I did before I had all of my teeth removed and replaced with dentures. I don’t have dentures, either.
I have perfect teeth. I’ve made a mess of my life in many ways. Discovering late in life that I’m autistic, bipolar, AND have ADHD (on top of your garden variety depression, anxiety, and insomnia) made me have more compassion toward myself and my unfortunate predilection for messiness and self-sabotage.
I’d love to start over in myriad facets of my life, primarily professionally. Getting dental implants afforded me a great cosmic “do over.” I have a chance to get things right this time. I will not blow it.
I’m doing everything by the book this time around. I’m brushing my teeth. I stopped smoking pot. I also stopped drinking alcohol. That doesn’t have anything to do with the implants, but I was a nightly drinker, and it had no effect on me whatsoever. I didn’t get drunk. I didn’t get tipsy. It didn’t make me feel good. I just drank every night out of habit and tradition.
I’ve been on the wagon for about two months now. It feels good. The nice thing about refraining from alcohol for an extended period of time is that your tolerance goes way down, and you can actually get drunk. That’s precisely what I intend to do at the Corey Feldman/Limp Bizkit concert I am about to attend.
There was some delusional part of me that thought that all of my problems would disappear if I stopped drinking and smoking pot. Then I would have no choice but to live in the moment and do all of the responsible things that I wouldn’t do if I was drunk or high.
That turns out not to be the case. I still have all of the problems that I had before. Life remains exceedingly difficult, but it’s gotten a whole lot better recently, and I have many of you to thank for that.
The dental implants and GoFundMe windfall are the best things that have happened to me in a long time. The experience made me feel loved and appreciated. It was very nice. It meant the world to me.
I can’t eat solid food for another two months, and it looks like I will have to overcome a speech impediment for a THIRD TIME (that’s a blog post for another time), but I FUCKING LOVE MY NEW TEETH. They make me so happy!
Life will always be difficult for me. So I savor the victories. I’m excited about eating solid food in the not-too-distant future.
I’m going to treasure every sandwich because being able to enjoy them with perfect permanent teeth is miraculous in its own way, and I will never take something as seemingly simple as that for granted ever again.
Nathan needs teeth that work, and his dental plan doesn't cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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