The Price of a Smile

One of my twins, Mallory, has enamel hypoplasia (underdevelopment or lack of development of tooth enamel) which I’ve been told is a side effect of the medicines she was on as a premature infant. When she was younger, and we were making frequent trips to Omaha (3 hour one way drive), she was seeing a pedodontist.

As she approached school age, I didn’t want her missing a whole day of school just for a dentist visit, so I began taking her to the nearest dentist that accepted our dental insurance. I want to use a participating provider to not only get the PPO discount, but then the insurance pays the provider directly. Otherwise the insurance checks go to my ex-husband, and it’s like pulling teeth (pun intended) to get the checks from him.

Anyway, that dentist just kept telling us she needs to brush better, use fluoride trays, and will eventually need veneers. Mallory tried braces, and the orthodontist gave her prescription toothpaste, but the braces wore her teeth down more, so we took them off early (still cost the same, though :-).

Then a few months ago, one tooth was hurting her so bad, and I found a new dentist that accepts Delta Dental (the other dentist retired). He said her teeth are “too far gone” for him to help and referred us on to an oral surgeon to extract the abscessed tooth and back to the same pedodontist we had seen years earlier! And we loved Carmen Dana, DDS., so was hoping she could help.

Upon seeing Dr. Dana, she said Mallory would need extensive dental work in a hospital setting (she doesn’t do hospital cases), so referred us to her partner who does such. But Dr. Milius then referred us on to Dr. Ben Hardy saying she needed an adult dentist (she is 14) and not a pediatric dentist. Dr. Ben Hardy doesn’t do hospital cases, either! But for never having met us, he was extremely nice to go out of his way to find a dentist that does.

Which led us to our consultation with Dr. Christopher Stanoscheck. I was excited that we finally found someone who would be able to give Mallory a “smile makeover”. I was already to schedule the hospital date, hoping we could get Mallory all fixed up before school starts in August. That was until I saw the price tag attached.

Now, being a thrifty shopper, I had prepared myself that fixing Mallory’s teeth would be expensive. Shauna (my cousin with the newborn twins) is an orthodontic assistant and told me to expect to pay about $10,000. Imagine my shock to hear that I would need to put $11,000 down, and that was only the dental work (root canals and fillings) and didn’t include the hospital anesthesia bill, nor the crowns and bridges that she’ll need later.

Our dental insurance only pays out $1500 maximum per year, only a small piece of the big puzzle, and I hate the idea of taking out a high-interest loan. So, here I am not being able to sleep at 2 a.m. trying to figure out all our options so Miss Mally Dally can smile pretty, and I figured typing it all out would help. To be continued…