Hello and thank you for taking the time to read this and to consider helping myself and my family.
My husband and I live with our 3 daughters (12, 7 and 4) in the rural Midwest. He works full time at our local farmer’s co-op elevator and is a veteran US Marine. I stay home with our youngest and function as our family COO, in addition to helping my nearly 80yr old dad continue to live and work on the ranch where he raised me.
Our family has faced numerous significant financial setbacks over the last year which have made this current ‘dental disaster’ feel insurmountable. The chaos started last summer when we needed to add some duct work to two rooms in our 111yr old home. That morphed into needing new ducting throughout the entire house and a new water heater at the same time. Next, we went to replace a leaking toilet and discovered we would have to also replace the entire subfloor in the bathroom, along with replacing the tub, surround, and drywall behind the surround. At the end of that journey, our only car died and we had to replace it as well.
We’d no more than caught our breath, when we learned our two youngest would need to have multiple cavities filled and because of their age, the recommendation was to do all the work at a single appointment under general anesthesia. After insurance, our portion of this will be about $4,000. We’d started saving and making our plans to pay for this when I developed a toothache.
I’m one of the rare, ‘lucky’ individuals who have a malformation in my jaw which doesn’t allow me to get numb during dental procedures. Because of this, I have severe dental anxiety and as a result, haven’t been to a dentist in about 16 years. I found a place a few hours away who advertised themselves as being the regional experts in sedation dentistry, but I was very disappointed in the lack of empathy and compassion displayed by the provider and his staff. That office gave me an estimate of about $8,000 to fix multiple cavities, perform several root canals and place crowns. I found another provider in a different state for a second opinion, and while he and his staff are head and shoulders above the first place in terms of kindness, compassion, and overall professionalism, his estimate also came in at more than 3 times the first place. This is because he doesn’t believe any of my teeth other than the front six, top and bottom, are salvageable.
His recommendation is to do implant bridges and fix the remaining cavities on my lowers, and to do total extractions with full implants on my uppers. While we are able to pay for the immediate extraction to get me out of acute pain, that still leaves us with about $30,000 we’ll need to come up with between my teeth and our daughter’s.
We simply don’t have any way to finance these costs at this time, so I’m pleading for any help we can get.
Thank you again for taking the time to read this, and if you are able to help in any way, my family and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts!
Cashapp – $lisaxdiane
PayPal – @LisaMullen
Venmo – @Lisa-Mullen-87