I never thought I would be blogging about a trip to the dentist, but then I never thought I would have to get a crown either.
Eating some of our home made muesli about a month ago, I bit into a bit of date seed that had slipped in with the diced dried date that we put in. Sure enough, it snapped half of my upper left back molar.
Unfun. It rubbed on my cheek and hurt like nuts. It also was super sensitive to any warm or cold. So, I have invented a new diet.
Snap half your tooth off and you can eat a whole lot less in the same amount of time while you use your tongue to keep anything from touching that part of your mouth.
I lost 1.5 inches around the waste (had to take the belt up a notch) in the past month. Highly recommend it.
So, finally got an appointment and he made the point that the tooth root was good, so keep the tooth as you may have another 40 years to go, and it would be a shame to lose it when it can be capped with a crown. In this case he was recommending a porcelain one.
Reason for this over gold was that he has a porcelain milling machine at the office and so it can be made and fitted in the one visit.
Gold crowns take two, one to measure and another to fit.
Now we get to the high tech stuff….. this first visit involved all the usual X-rays, but also some pretty neat in mouth camera work.
It clearly showed what I did not want to know. The tooth next to the one that broke had cracks in its fillings and the back half was pretty much dead. There was no point in just fixing the one that broke when the one next to it was half dead.
The camera also showed that I had 4 other cracked fillings mostly in my back teeth. You can see them clear as day in the video. Blah.
So, yesterday was the big day. 2.5 hours in the chair, but it was a dentist visit like I have never had before……
They have this cool mouth thing that goes in your mouth that you can rest your teeth on and thus no more sore jaw. It also keeps your tongue out of the way and provides pretty effective suction off the floor of your mouth, so you just dont feel the need to swallow all the time.
The usual needles to numb the area were pretty much the same, a little less obvious.
The drill is the same. Once the old dead tooth was gone the fun starts.
Because the tooth broke off just below the gum line, he had to use a laser to cut and cauterize the gum. That felt pretty weird. Its hard to describe. It was like having a thousand tiny bubbles trying to burst out of your gum.
Then, he puts a powder on the tooth and then another camera. This powder / camera is the three dimensional modeling that the milling machine takes in so that the crown fits on top of the now cleaned up stub of the old tooth.
You get to see the process and its pretty cool to see him make the tooth on the computer screen.
Then he took me around and showed me my new tooth getting milled. It was pretty neat.
Once its made, its glued on and that’s about it.
2.5 hours. Two crowns, two fillings and a very light wallet.
I aint chewing on it yet and I am still wondering if the nice date taste is worth the risk each morning.
