I started yesterday with a visit to the 7Oaks Laser Dental Centre, where I go every few weeks to see Dr. Ajar, the Oral Surgeon who is fitting me with dental implants. This is my second visit since I last blogged about my dental adventures. I realize that many will not find this of interest, but my family may wish to know the progress, and I’m actually starting to get visitors from Google searches on dental implants.

It seems I heal too well. The last visit was to expose the screws that had been implanted and was awaiting me to grow bone into the threads of the screws. My body accomplished that goal, and also grew bone around several of the screw heads.

After a couple of weeks for the gums to heal so they were stiff to pressure, yesterday was time to go in for the final impressions for the model of my mouth that will be used to make the crowns that will go on the implants. But the night before, I could only count 5 healing abutments, which are the ends that had been placed on the implants during the last visit so the gums would heal with tooth shaped holes. Sure enough, I had overly healthy gums that grew right over the abutment that was supposed to keep such a thing from happening.

This all meant extra work for Dr. Ajar, and extra pain for me; but of course it is good news when you heal better than expected. All that is left now is that I will have to go to the dental lab, which is downtown Vancouver, to have them match my tooth shade. I’ve always had the dentist do that himself, but since this is so permanent, they will apparently be shining a bunch of different lights on me so that they can match my shade in fluorescent light, my shade in sunlight, my shade in incandescent light, etc.; and then average these. Then on March 17th, I return to the dentist’s office for the crowns to be attached.