For The Love Of God, Visit Your Dentist

I just came back from the dentist. At the age of 26, I had my very first cavity filled in today. I then got the last of my scaling (see: horrible gum gouging) done.

This is awful to admit: This July was the first time I've been to the dentist in approximately 6 years. I don't know what I was thinking. Ok, well, I do. For the longest time I didn't have any dental coverage (interning, probationary term at work, getting laid off from said work, freelance/temp work, another probationary term at work), so I completely fell out of the dental loop. Then I just got lazy. And then I got all scaredy about what they might find.

Thankfully, I'm a brusher and a flosser, so my teeth and gums were in decent condition. However, he found a cavity buried between a couple teeth. This bad boy apparently had been nestling in for a few years and felt so at home that it had probably been wandering around in its fat-pants and drinking juice straight from the carton.

In other words, my cavity was DEEP. Like, close to the nerve and gums deep (it was a "two-pronged" cavity - way to multitask, decay!). The dentist said there was a decent chance that in the future (anything between a couple weeks to a couple years) that I may have trouble and would need a root canal and perhaps some gum work around the tooth where that cavity was. Gross.

The spaz in me immediately went to Google images to see just what a root canal entailed. The results were horrifying. The point of this post is that THIS COULD BE YOU if you don't go to your dentist regularly and get things nipped in the bud: