Fleeing Into November

So, October sucked and I'm very glad it's over.

About a week and a half into the month, my gastroparesis flared up, and off to the ER we went. This is bad enough -- having your stomach working at turning itself inside-out with enough determination as to require intravenous meds is pretty sucktastic. We got that straightened out, I came home and collapsed, and then took most of a week to recover. My stomach was mostly fine as of the next day, but being that sick sucks the energy right out of me, and it usually takes five or six days to get back to my old activity level, with enough energy to actually spend most of each day conscious.

[The upside of this is that it was my first ER visit in about eleven months. Two or three years ago, my husband worked out that we had to run to the ER on the average of every four weeks, for the whole year. Yeah, I'll take an eleven-month gap and be pretty happy about it.]

Then about a week before Halloween, I snapped an incisor. :/ I was chewing on something, then felt this SNAP! and one of my (thankfully root-canalled and crowned) incisors was just sort of sitting in its socket, not actually attached any more. Crap.

This happened to me before, a few years ago. (The other large incisor, the one right next to the one that broke off this time.) I just went to the dentist on Wednesday, because we'd cancelled our dental insurance (this has been a tight year financially) and had to sign back up again. The renewed insurance didn't kick in till the first of the month, so holding pattern until then.

Even if everything goes perfectly, this is going to take months to resolve. I'm getting another implant, which is fine, but it comes in several steps, with months between each step for thorough healing before progressing on. So I've got this hole in my face (again) and I'm going to be dealing with it until, probably, some time this coming summer. Late spring at the earliest.

I decided to skip the temporary, cosmetic not-really-replacement thing this time. Last time, I got an ultra-temporary fake tooth cemented in, because I was two days from dashing off to a workshop, and there was no time to do the long-term temporary replacement at that point. The ultra-temporary was so fragile, my dentist told me not even to brush while I had it. When your dentist says not to brush, that's Fragile with a capital F. :P And it fell out three days later anyway, so that was $800 wasted.

The long-term temporary thing was what's called a "flipper," which is basically a denture-y thing with only one tooth on it. You have to remove it to eat, and although they told me I'd get used to talking with it in, I never did. And after I got my implant post put in, the periodontist did some drilling at the base of the fake tooth in my flipper so it'd fit over the cap at the top of the post, but it never did fit right, so it was even more annoying to wear and I hardly ever did. I don't remember what the flipper cost, but it was somewhere in the $$$$ range. I've decided to bail on that one too. Way too much expense for a purely cosmetic deal that's non-functional and uncomfortable. Nah, I'll skip it. If people want to stare at the hole in my face, they're welcome to do so.

At least this time when I went to the dentist for the preliminary look-around (which was basically for the purpose of saying, "Yep, you need an implant,") she mentioned that I have a very deep bite, which means when I close my jaw, my upper teeth overlap my lower teeth almost completely. That apparently puts a lot of pressure on those upper teeth, which is why I've had the breakage problem. Okay, well, there's nothing I can do about it, but I guess it's good to know why this keeps happening. :/

So, that was October. Good riddance.

Now it's November, and I'm doing NaNoWriMo. I'm AngiePen on the site, if you're playing too and want to Buddy me. I'm working on a romance novel, and things are going well so far. I've had about 46K words of this one sitting on my hard drive for a couple of years now, so I've pulled it out to work on. I'm pretty sure I have 50K words of it left. If not, but I finish at some lesser wordcount, that's fine; I consider finished novels a win no matter what the wordcount. :)

If I wrap the current book with, like, 30K words or so, and still have at least a week left in the month, I'll probably pull out another partial project (yeah, I have a lot of 'em [cough]) and work on that, and lump the wordcount together for purposes of NaNo. No biggie.

I've been having a sucktastic writing year, though, so doing a couple thousand words a day for multiple days in a row has felt awesome. Now if I can only keep it going.... [crossed fingers]

Who else is doing NaNo this year...?

Angie