Oral health is very important. It is correlated with good heart health, although they don’t seem to know why. It might have something to do with the way bacteria enter the blood stream through the gums and end up attacking the heart, but that is just one thing my dentist mentioned.
If you’re 82, you could be young still. You might have fifteen more years left. Being unable to eat is a really big degradation of life and activities of daily living. It just plain sucks. So if that is what your mother is facing, then dental care may well be what she needs more than anything else.
And people are living longer with dimentia now than ever before. Still, you have to ask yourself about their quality of life if they have dimentia. And it’s worse if they have degraded mental faculties and very bad teeth.
We have a habit of saying nothing is too good for our parents. We feel guilty if we don’t spend every penny to try to make their lives as comfortable as possible. But are we doing them any favors? Some huge amount of money is spent on health care in the last days of a person’s life—like a quarter or even a half of all the money spend in the entire life.
I think it is easy to encourage people to resist this, but it is hard to resist because then you think you aren’t doing right by your parents. Will this spending improve your mother’s life? By how much? How much worse off will it be for sitting in the dentist’s chair? How much time and pain will it cause? It’s a very tough decision to make.
I’m going in for the second half of a root canal tomorrow. My tooth feels so much better. It was a pain getting the nerve drilled out, but it seems like it will be worth it. It’s been over a year since I could bite down on that tooth.
I’m going against everyone else. I’m thinking it’s money well spent if it really improves her oral health. Maybe you could spread it out. Maybe you could buy insurance to help pay for it. But if she lives another ten or fifteen years and her teeth haven’t been fixed, then it seems to me you could be feeling pretty guilty about that. It’s just hard to know what the future will bring.