Well once again I have not posted for a few days, and my excuse this time….

…. dental surgery.

I won’t give you all the gory details, but for you that did not know, I have been working towards correcting issues with my mouth that I have had for most of my life. Part of it stems from a bicycle accident when I was a kid that knocked out my right front tooth the same year it came in as an adult tooth. I blame it on the rural town Abbotsford used to be, as it happened at a major intersection which was at the time gravel. The tooth was put back in with an emergency root canal; but that only lasted a few years. I’ve been wearing a fake tooth since then on what dentist call a flipper; basically it’s a one tooth denture, or more formally it is a removable partial denture. I also chipped the left front tooth, I think it was in a separate incident, but the bottom half of the tooth was fake and needed to be re-done every 10 years or so.

As I kid I told the family dentist that the tooth on the right side of that missing right tooth was slowly rotating and slipping in behind the fake tooth. As new flippers were made as my mouth grew, they allowed a few more millimeters room for it to slip more. The accident also seemed to have stunted it’s growth. He told me, “Don’t worry about it, it will be ground down to a stub to support a bridge once you are old enough”. Once I was old enough (16) and went to him requesting a bridge, he said “That tooth has rotated and moved, you’ll need a couple of years of orthodontics to bring it back into place before we can do a bridge”. He said it not only as if I had never mentioned it, but as if he had not seen it moving. This from the dentist that was doing my exams twice a year.

To complicate things, my mother’s side of the family has an inherited condition (ok, that sounds bad, but I don’t know what else you would call it) whereby we have a few adult teeth missing. It will vary for each person as to which ones they are, and for me it is the two upper canines. Once again, I told the fantastic dentist we had that two of my baby teeth had never fallen out; and in this case he never looked in my mouth, but instead consulted a chart where he had X’d out all of my baby teeth. He showed me this as proof that they had fallen out, despite the fact that he knew my mother had three teeth that had never had the adults form. I’m assuming that she would have told him that her sister and mother were the same. As soon as I was old enough to choose my own dentist, I did, and during the first appointment I was asked if I knew I still had two baby teeth. They could tell as x-rays clearly show there is no root on the teeth nor any bud of an adult tooth under it. In this case, the flipper has helped as it keeps the teeth from wiggling loose and falling out like most baby teeth.

The result of all of this is, of all my top teeth from one canine around to the other, I only had one undamaged, un-stunted, not migrated too much tooth. My strong enamel has been of little help.

Armed with a dental plan and a new dental office that I like and trust, I am finally fixing my mouth. I am going to 7Oaks Laser Dental Centre in the Seven Oaks mall near my home. They are the first dentist I have seen or heard of in some time that only charge the “book rate” for procedures, which is the maximum your health plan will allow when figuring out their portion. Normally if your plan will pay for 85% of procedures, but your dentist charges 50% more than book rate; then you pay 15% + 50% out of your own pocket.

But in spite of their reasonable rates, they are well equipped, well staffed and very professional. In addition, they have on staff a Oral Surgeon, Dr. Amir Ajar, who comes into the office 1 1/2 days a week, visits a few of their affiliate offices also, and then teaches an Vancouver General Hospital, the main teaching hospital in the province. We’re pretty lucky that someone with his credentials comes out as far as Abbotsford; normally one would have to travel into Vancouver proper to see such a specialist. Dr. Ajar is handling the reconstruction of my mouth.

Because I had only one good tooth in the top of my mouth besides the molars, to put in a bridge would require grinding down to stubs the teeth are there plus the first molar on each side, and then using the stubs as anchors to cement an 8 tooth bridge from the first molar around to the other first molar. Even then I would run the risk of breaking one of the few anchor teeth in the bridge, especially since not all were in their proper position or orientation. Also, all bridges and crowns eventually have to be replaced as they are not as strong as real teeth, and prying the bridge off the stubs would involve a lot of risk of breaking an anchor tooth when that time comes. Instead, we agreed that implants would be my best route.

So last fall my four bad teeth and one good one were pulled, and six implants were screwed into the bone. My job since then has been to grow bone around them and into the threads. On Monday I went in and they exposed them, and either this weekend or next I will get the final impressions taken for crowns to be made. Within about a month, I will have the final replacement teeth in place. When they finally need replacing in the future, they can simply be unscrewed from the implants.

I look forward to finally being without a denture and with a straight smile, and Karin looks forward to kissing me without a denture. The one thing I will have to be cautious about is the roof of my mouth; it has been protected by the denture for so long that it has become tender and I easily blister when I don’t have it in place and eat hot food. To make it worse, with the protection of the flipper, I tend to put things in my mouth that would burn the average person’s roof, and so I will have to break that habit or really cause some damage.

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