Post Chemo Dental Care
When people picture cancer, they picture the big stuff, the diagnosis, the chemo, and the surgeries. All of it is as hard as it sounds, and then some. Nobody warns you about how cancer keeps taking from you long after treatment is over.
I am eight years into my bladder cancer diagnosis, and on paper that sounds like a win. It is because I am still here, but my body kept the receipts, and it hands me a new bill when I least expect it.
I had good teeth my whole life, my grandmother had all of her natural teeth when she passed in her 90s. I had cavities, but always had really good, strong teeth. Since chemo, they have become weaker, and easy to crack. I have had four crowns in eight years. Two of my front teeth got chipped during surgery when I clamped down as they pulled the breathing tube out, and that threw off my whole bite. Now I grind at night, and my bottom teeth are shifting because of it. None of that shows up in a survival statistic, but it shows up in my life every single day. And I developed this weird lisp!
Here is what I want you to understand, whether you are living this yourself or you love someone who is. The cost does not stop when treatment does. Fixing what cancer broke costs more than just money, and most of us do not have that anyway. Adding to the complete financial toxicity of my cancer experience, my first three crowns cost under $800 each with my insurance. I would save up every year to get the worst one fixed, then wait until the next year to get the rest. This year, the cost shot up to over $1000. Add another $500 just to fix my two front teeth that were chipped and I had to put dental work on a high-interest credit card because there was no other way to pay for it. The bills tied to cancer did not end with treatment, they just changed shape.
Your body starts playing by new rules too. Chemo can change your body chemistry for good, and I found that out the hard way. Some toothpastes give me sores on my tongue, later was diagnosed with a condition called geographic tongue, that turned out to be a new side effect. Small things I never had to think about became things I now have to manage every day. I had to stop eating any type of hard or crunchy food like carrots, apples, nectarines, corn on the cob, as I fear I could crack or chip more teeth that will need to be repaired. I now have to get the laughing gas at $250 each time because the medication in the numbing shot puts my body in a physical panic attack with shaking, heavy breathing, crying, high heart rate. At least the gas keeps me calm through that painful shot. It is scary especially when you never had that problem before. I now have a lot of sensitivity and lower pain tolerance in my mouth when I could get a filling with barely any numbing at all. There is now physical costs added to the financial costs.
Then there is the emotional weight, which is just as real as the rest. When you stop wanting to smile because of your teeth, or you get thrown into a panic reaction at a routine appointment, it wears on you, but it is not weakness. It is what happens when your body has been through something big and keeps finding ways to remind you of it. There is emotional guilt of spending any significant money on dental care. And there is also regret, especially when you make one tiny decision to fix your teeth and it doesn’t end up working out like you hoped and causes new issues. You cannot go back to the way it was. Now I have a worse lisp to avoid my upper teeth bumping against my lower teeth.
I am not sharing this for sympathy. I am sharing it because when I was in the thick of it, I felt completely alone, and nobody told me this part even existed. If someone had, I would have felt less shocked and a lot more prepared. So consider this me telling you. I have sat through dental work that left me shaking and in tears, and I still walked back in for the next appointment because I had to. You learn to get through it, and you learn a new normal, however shitty that new normal turns out to be. That is resilience, even when it does not feel like anything but survival.
If you are a survivor dealing with after-effects nobody warned you about, you are not imagining it and you are not alone. And if you love someone who finished treatment and you thought the hard part was behind them, please know the road can keep going for a while yet.
Cancer is a full-body, full-life, full-wallet experience, and the ending is never as clean as people think it is. The more we say that out loud, the less alone the next person feels when it happens to them.
That is the whole reason I built Bless Your Vibes Cancer Support Studio. If you need resources, encouragement, or just proof that someone gets it, come find and follow me on my socials @blessyourvibes. And don’t forget to subscribe to my website for the latest news and articles from Bless Your Vibes.
If this hit home and you want to help, the most real way is to grab a copy of my Cancer Care Book or something from my shop. Every dollar of profit is going straight toward paying down the high-interest (32.98%) CareCredit bill this dental work landed me in. You get something meaningful, and you help me dig out of a hole cancer dug for me. That is a win I will take.
Thank you friends! <3