Dental Dilemma

Well folks, it’s been fun and games around here these past few weeks. To say I’ve been having a few problems with my teeth would be putting it mildly. Although it’s not so much the teeth that are the problem as the gums. Apparently, when you get to my age it’s not tooth decay you need to worry about, but rotting gums.

It’s my own fault, since moving to the US I’ve been very erratic about dental visits, back in England, I used to go religiously every six months. But here it’s just so bloody expensive, even when you have insurance. Hell, you need to re-mortgage the house just to get your teeth cleaned. Mind you, sad to say, I hear things have gone much the same way in England. What’s the National health Service coming to, I wonder?

Anyway, when I began experiencing some discomfort in an area of my gums, I thought, uh oh this feels expensive. But I did go and get it checked out – even though I did have to wait five weeks for an appointment. They took a whole bunch of x-rays, and scared me to death by telling me I definitely had something going on back there, but they didn’t know what. Of course, in my mind it had to be cancer of the jaw, at the very least. They also said I had lost quite a bit of bone around my teeth, so they were referring me to a periodontist. Needless to say, the nearest one was 50 miles away in Joplin, Missouri. (Sigh!)

To cut a long story short, it turns out my bite was out of line and needed correcting, and I had gum disease which was causing the bone loss. This resulted in spending four (yes, 4 hours!) in the chair on Tuesday, having my teeth sandblasted, sorry, deep cleaned and ground back into place. By the time I staggered from the office, my jaw felt like I had gone ten rounds with Mohammed Ali.

But it gets worse, she put all this packing around my gums, and put me on a liquid diet for a week, and soft foods for a week after that. "What about my blog?" I wailed, "my readers don’t want to look at a can of Ensure." It was to no avail, so I told Mick to get extra wine in, and resigned myself to my predicament. ;-)

Fortunately for me I have lots of tomato and basil soup in the freezer, thanks to Cheryl’s lovely recipe, and you can find more yummies here http://cookingdunkinstyle.blogspot.com/ It’s also a good thing that it’s winter, and I can still make soups, and pop them in the blender.

But if any of you have any recipes that require zero chewing for this week, and little chewing for next week, I’d be much obliged if you’d pass them along.

I’ll be back later with something I prepared earlier, in those halcyon P.D. – Pre-dentist days.

Cheers.