Help Save Teeth From Cracking: Save A Smile

Hello! Every donation payment will be posted on here as a picture of the receipt, proof of payment to the dental office as I pay it off.

The world is crazy. What are we even doing here? I thought as an adult I could eat whatever I wanted. Turns out eating ice cream after soup for years causes swelling and contracting. My teeth are LITERALLY cracking. Nobody warned me about this adult thing. Nobody taught me how to care for my teeth besides brushing and flossing. I need your help please.

The educating part, I'm doing on my own. I've always been a fast learner. My regular cleanings are even starting to smoother. But in order to save my teeth I need to pay off my orthodontist. I've never been the type of person to get anyone mad but I think she's starting to come after me. Which is crazy, because she's the sweetest thing. My $100 a pay period has me counting quarters and she ain't havin' it.

I need some assistance. Please. From someone that understands how scary it is to have recurring dreams of your teeth falling out. That iron taste inside the gummy gap inside the missing tooth hole. NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NO no no no nope nope nuh uh. Can you please donate? I'm in over ten grand deep. I'm going to need more work done in the next year or two but there is absolutely no way I can get it done the way things are now financially. I'm not asking for the full ten, just some help, please.

Thank you for any donation. Sincerely. I owe you an appreciative nod, maybe a hug, but definitely a kind heart-felt confident smile.

You could probably just stop reading here, but if you like to listen to stories, well, here's mine:

A little background:

I had a bunch of cavities as a kid. My low-income parents have a laundry list of mental health problems that have never been addressed and so the neglect of my (and my brother's) oral health was only ever resolved by being taken to the dentist regularly every time we had a new sensitivity. Eventually my molars came in and they came in sideways, bunching up my teeth. My parents were kind enough to get me braces after all 4 molars were removed in a single session.

I guess with my depression, anxiety, bpd, adhd, ocd, and ptsd, I have the lottery ticket to be a great delusional artist, but my stress seeps into my nighttime routine and I've developed such an intense grind when I sleep that my back teeth have been flushed flat from grinding. My dentist had also seen the progression over the years and my lack of money always shamefully kept me saying, "I know, but I just can't right now."

When the pandemic hit, my trusty retainer had cracked and my teeth were shifting so much faster than I could ever imagine. I couldn't eat certain food. I was getting sharp pains in places in my mouth I didn't even know had nerves. Drinking water at certain temperatures became intolerable and it wasn't rare to be kept up at night from sharp nerve pain coming from my teeth and somehow I would feel it up to my temple. With the pandemic full swing and being broke, it was a nightmare.

Trying to save some money and cut corners I thought Smile Direct would be a good alternative to Invisalign. I will pause the story here so we can all have a nice long full laugh at my naivety. Yup. And here I thought I was looking out for myself. Oh man. Smile Direct scraped my enamel to thin sheets and caused even more pain. I guess they were squeezing in teeth into places they didn't fit into. I later found out the "doctor" who approved my aligners had previously been a manager at Best Buy. What a professional. Again, I will pause for the audience to throw tomatoes at me, if that's still something people do in 2024.

With my teeth thinner than before, and with MORE freakin' cracks, my dentist gave me a quote for Invisalign and braces. Again, being really broke and working full time and in school to finish a degree, I thought I'd go to the McDonalds of dentists here in my neck of the woods called Bright Now Dental and... yeah, by now you guessed that was a mistake too and I should just bury my head in the sand.

What is wrong with me? This entire process dragged out so long due to the pandemic and it was wearing thin on my mental well being. Lack of sleep. Crying spells. Existential frustrations. Wondering why I was so stupid and jealous of people with healthy wealthy families and parents that give sound advice and how I could only learn and do research on top of school to come out on top. I think I cracked.

Honestly, I think I blacked out that period of time between the cheap braces that were doing something else wrong that was hurting and the time I finally went to my dentist. I knew something was wrong since I had had braces before and they weren't supposed to work like this. By this time I was done. I was defeated. I finally collapsed from exhaustion and crawled back to the fancy pants dentist with the marina yacht club view I got my free cleanings done. I went into more debt than I have ever had in my life. Sheeeeeeiiiit, I'm there right now. I've always been so careful to only stick to my necessities and even go towards a vocation degree to not rack up that school debt, but here I am in debt. Freakin' teeth. Ain't no pain like it. Maybe mental pain, but that's all wound up and connected too.

I've maxed out my CareCredit and owe over $7,000 and owe the dentist (post insurance coverage) over $3,000 from my own pocket. That's today after all the payments I've been making. I paid for work and a mouth guard that's helping keep my teeth in place. My dentist is super kind and really explains everything so sweetly and caringly and has taken the precautions to not let my front teeth clash into one another but at I price I feel like I will pay for the rest of my life. My teeth are still shifting and are only getting worse.

I'm trying to hustle. I pick up extra shifts. I'm not lazy. I'm trying to tackle this from all angles. I thought I'd ask the internet gods for free money. I've never done this before.

If you're just normal like me, but hopefully smarter, could you toss in a fiver? If you stuck around this long, I hope you're brushing and flossing your teeth.

THANK YOU!

Out of the 8-10 teeth I could only get a couple of pictures under certain filters