i woke up at 8:30 to get ready for my 10:00 dentist appointment in allston. it was supposed to snow early this morning, but when i looked out the window, i was disappointed to see there wasn't any of that white stuff. i decided to take the 66 bus into allston center from harvard square. i left the house by 9:10, but already that was too late. it takes me 15 minutes to walk down to harvard square, but i didn't know how much money i had on my charlie card so i needed to visit the underground station to recharge. that took an additional 6-7 minutes, which turned out to be unnecessary since i still had $5 on the card, enough for a roundtrip bus trip. by the time i finally went to the bus stop, the 9:33 bus was just leaving. the next bus wouldn't arrive until 9:41, and it'd take 18 minutes to get to the intersection of harvard and commonwealth avenue, barring any traffic jams.

i arrived at the dentist office 5 minutes late. i told my dentist about my broken tooth. he was concerned about it enough to take another x-ray. i didn't have many options because the tooth itself was in bad shape. apparently my china root canal had already moved a lot of tooth material, but when i cracked off a quarter of it last week, it made it so that there wasn't enough to do a crown. and even if i could, the root is in bad enough shape that the tooth would eventually fall out over time. my number 1 option was to simply remove the damage tooth. option number 2 was to do a cheap stainless steel crown, which would still only last 2-3 years before i needed to replace it.

the other option - which neither dentists mentioned until i brought it up - was to get a dental implant. of course that's the most expensive but also the most permanent and convenient solution. even with dental insurance, most don't cover implant procedures. my dentist gave me a ballpark price of around $3500. to do the implant i would go to an oral surgeon ($2000, maybe more if i needed bone grafting) and then come back here to get the crown on top of the implant ($1500). it'd also take about 4 months, most of that time for the titanium dental screw to bond with the jawbone. as for my cracked molar on the other side of my mouth, eventually i'd need to get a crown done for that ($1000). yeah, so some expensive dental work in my near future. in the meantime, doctor huang filed down the cracked molar and went ahead with my teeth cleaning, which was the original reason why i came in the first place ($60 for the cleaning, $15 for the x-ray). he gave me a referral notice before i left, to get a consultation from the oral surgeon.

i managed to hop onto an outbound 66 bus immediately after i left the dentist office. i kept tonguing my broken tooth, taking sips of tea from my travel mug.

i got home a bit before 12:00 but didn't eat until 1:00. i made an egg english muffin sandwich and kept wanting to test my broken tooth, see how well it performed. it seemed fine with soft food, but how about hard food? so i also tried some crackers and later chunky ice cream. food kept seeming to get stuck in there, and i went to the bathroom a few times to floss/brush/rinse the obstruction. i kept tonguing at the tooth the whole day until late in the afternoon i realized what was the problem: another section of the molar had broken off and was loose. normally i'd be in pain but because of the chinese root canal i had no sensation in that tooth. it also wasn't loose enough that i could try to pull out the broken piece myself. but that left me with little options: the tooth would have to be removed soon, and i'd look into about getting an implant.

in the early evening i went out for a quick photographic stroll when i saw the beautiful sunset clouds. unfortunately i did have a good view of the sky and eventually the clouds drifted far enough away that i couldn't get a good shot anymore. i walked as far as the dana street bridge before turning back.

it was a chilly day and i actually turned on the heat in the house by the afternoon. hungry, i had a bowl of cereal around 6:00. i drifted off to sleep on the couch around 6:30, waking up at 8:00 to look for more food which came in the form of pizza rolls. earlier i was watching the animated over the garden wall and finished the last few episodes.

the past 2 days i've had to wake up early, so i'm looking forward to sleeping late saturday morning.