Years later, I remarried, and we moved to Florida. My husband is a long-time diabetic. Once again, I dove into healthy eating. My kids all grown, and financial stability, health insurance—life was good! My weight wasn’t budging, and husband's A1C wasn’t budging. As a youth, I was very active. I played soccer, baseball, and tag football, and rode my bike for miles every day after school and on weekends when didn’t walk. I continued to walk a lot well into my 20s and 30s.
But later into my 30s things began to change. First, I was making old-fashioned homemade meals, bread, pasta, rolls, you name it. As my weight started to feel out of control, I looked into exercising more. I dabbled in body building, and yoga. It didn’t help.
Being told at around 13 that I had periodontal disease and needed to brush and floss, or I would lose my teeth as a young adult, I brushed and brushed and brushed, only to discover in my early 40s that the real issue was an allergy to fluoride that was causing the redness, bleeding, and later infection.
Somewhere in my mid to late 30s, I began to focus on more healthy foods and products with a small budget. I did find a non-fluoride toothpaste for my family. Within days, I was like wow, my mouth felt so good. You see, I lived on over the counter pain pills to hand the deep infections. That all began to change without the fluoride. A little to late. . .
Once the major infection and swelling receded, my teeth began to fall out. I had not had insurance in years, but pulled together enough money to go to a dentist, hoping to save the majority of my teeth. She wanted me in surgery immediately! Horrifying times! I
was too young to deal with this and my vanity was taking a hit.
I saved and found a dentist to try and save my teeth. But what happened was she wanted me in surgery immediately. I was in great danger from the infection. It would require a 10K dollar procedure to pull all my badly infected teeth, and input temporary plates, followed by permanent ones months later after all the swelling was gone. We had no money, no credit cards, no credit. I had to leave there, in tears, scared and knowing that I was a walking heart attack or stroke waiting to happen. A mom of 3, my youngest was just a baby.
I had NO IDEA! I felt so stupid. I didn’t know that the infection I had been dealing with all those years, could have gotten into my blood stream and cause possible death or catastrophic damage to my well-being. . . to be continued.
