Toothache Is a Heart Stopper for Louisiana Woman

One morning last July, Marcia L. Ball, 64, who lives in a nursing home in Lafayette, La., awoke to find her cheek swollen up like a balloon.

For months she had had problems with decaying teeth. "When you have a toothache," Ball says, "your whole body hurts."

She developed an abscess that ran rampant, filling Ball's face with pus and sending her to the hospital with a raging fever and labored breathing.

After a surgical team drained the pus, her heart and lungs suddenly stopped working. She pulled through, but four days later developed pneumonia. A member of her medical team says that every time she inhaled, she sucked a mouthful of bacteria into her lungs.

After two weeks at the hospital, she returned to her nursing home. Medicaid paid for three rounds of antibiotics, two trips to the emergency room, two days in intensive care and the remainder of her hospital stay. But Medicaid in Louisiana—as in many other states—won't pay for extractions.

So Ball still has badly decayed teeth, which can abscess at any point, but she doesn't have $60 to cover the cost of an extraction or money or insurance for routine dental care.