Well, keep me in your prayers. Tooth #14 is set for a root canal treatment on Saturday at 12:30.

It's been giving me a lot of pain in the last 4 days, day and night. I've been on ibuprofen pretty regularly. So on Saturday I go in to see the endodontist (the doctor who does the root canal treatments) to get it taken care of.

That's the bad news. The more bad news is about Tooth #15, my backmost upper-left tooth. I had a root canal treatment (RCT) done on that one about 4 years ago, while I was still in college. So the nerves are gone, so I don't feel any pain, but apparently there is still something going on with it. In the x-rays, there's a pocket of dark area at the end of the roots of the tooth, in the bone. That usually means an infection. I have a few options from here: a retreatment of the infected area, endodontic surgery, or extraction. Retreatment would be ideal, as it most closely resembles a regular RCT. Endodontic is a bit more invasive and would be necessary if adequate access to the infected area weren't possible by the usual means. Extraction is the most expensive of the three options, as artificial teeth cost thousands of dollars, so we pray very hard that we won't have to resort to that.

The semi-good news is that Stephen found and signed up for a discount plan for the cost of these dental procedures, and it saved us $75 on cleaning, x-rays and an exam today, and it will probably end up saving us several hundred dollars in the long run. Praise God for that! But the total cost of all the work I need done will still be more than we can afford with our current means. It would be fantastic if I could get a job, or if Stephen could get a raise or a promotion. More practically and right now, just pray that we will be able to manage our money exceedingly well. All of these things would really help, and they are, of course, possible with God.

Thank you for your prayers and any encouragement you can offer.

That's the e-mail I sent my "circle of prayer."

Honestly, I can't say I have a ton of faith or hope right now that God is just going to fix everything. I know this is going to be extremely hard on us, way harder than I ever imagined we'd have to go through. We literally cannot afford the work that will be done, and are going to have to pay for most of it with credit. That's an extra $130 a month out of my husband's paycheck. And in 6 months, we have the *delightful* pressure of my loans not being able to be deferred anymore. We've been paying just interest for the last year or two, which is only $88 out of the $225 it would normally be.

My mom is paying the smallest of my loans off. My grandparents would buy me the world if they could (but I wish they wouldn't). My desperate mind keeps throwing out options of things we can cut out of our lives in order to have more cash flow. I keep thinking of all the things we could sell or get rid of in some way. Most of our DVDs. Half my wardrobe. The cat. One of our cars. I don't know. Every fear is escalated, every concern augmented. It's hard to think clearly.

Thank God I'm married to a man with a very different brain than mine. He has a plan in his head on how we are going to survive this life storm: use half of our savings to pay for the dental work, leaving us a cushion. Put the rest on Chase Credit. Tighten our belts in every possible way. He's much more sane about it than I am, and more motivated, too. He sees the money and where it goes every month. He watches his paycheck get halved. I only have a trivial understanding of where money goes and where it comes from.

We know we need to 1) stop eating out so much and 2) get me a job. Why do these two simple things seem so impossible right now? Because I don't want to work 5pm-11pm shifts at Target. Because the people at the grocery store gave me looks of shock and awe when I said I wanted to apply. Because I can't deal with people all day long and still hold my tongue. Because cooking is an unknown territory and I'm scared to enter it. Because I am still just as scared of making mistakes as ever I was. Because I spend too much time being self-absorbed? Haha. Weak laugh.

Tomorrow I will probably see Jenny. I'm afraid of that, too, because she is incurably cheerful and right now I probably seem like a real downer. I never know whether I can be a downer with people anymore. Friends take you as you are, but what about friends that haven't seen you in 6 months? What about friends that may have forgotten that you can BE a real downer sometimes? What about friends that have gotten caught up in the happinesses of their own lives and don't want to bother with people that interrupt their "flow"?

Jenny isn't like that, or at least she never was, but what can you tell about somebody you've only seen twice in the last 2 years?

I'll tell you something, Diary. I just reread those questions and realized that that's me I'm talking about there. We fear most in others what we dislike most in ourselves.

Well, Stephen will be home soon. We planned on going to Sweet Tomatoes tonight, because we got a coupon in the mail. We'll see what our plan is now, after what we found out after today's dentist appointment. My desperate mind grasping at straws again--'No, we can't spend $15 on dinner tonight, we have to save money so we can survive in the next decade!' Short-term thinkers should never try and lead the money-saving journey. They ought to leave that to the big-picture folk.

So many times we have had fights or disagreements or merely miscommunications because of our big-picture, long-term and details, short-term differences. Now I thank God I married him; I'd be lost at sea without his different brain.

That's all for now.

-Stephanie

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