Patient story · After an accident
'If I hadn't been in the accident, I would have been able to get it fixed.'
Hear it on the podcast
Christina cracked a tooth after an accident, when money was tight, and two years went by while it got worse.
Before
People often assume full-arch patients must have neglected their teeth for years. Christina didn't, and she's far from the only one.
"It's not that I haven't always taken care of my teeth, because I have. Growing up, my stepmother worked for an orthodontist. I even had braces when I was a kid."
She went to the dentist and had cavities filled when she had them.
Then a tooth cracked, at a moment when the money to fix it was not there.
"If I wasn't in the accident, I would have been able to afford - once that tooth cracked on the left side, I would have been able to get it fixed. But because of circumstances, I wasn't financially able to do so."
What two years does
This part has nothing to do with willpower.
"For the past two years, almost two years, it has just - it's decayed, it's broken, it's worse and worse, each month passes."
A cracked tooth doesn't wait while you save. Bacteria get in, and the damage builds. A repair you could afford the month it broke becomes a bigger repair, and then a different kind of treatment altogether.
That's why, when money is tight, we will remove actively infected teeth ahead of the rest of a treatment plan.
What she wanted
Her reason for going ahead is the one we hear most.
"Teeth are big to me, and I think everybody can agree. They want to look in the mirror and they want to smile and they want to look back and love what they see."
A different surgeon, the same result
Christina was the first in these interviews whose surgery was done by one of our other surgeons instead of Dr. Noorthoek. You couldn't tell from her result which of them had done it.
That's the goal of using one way of working across the whole practice.
Where she is now
Christina recorded this a few days after surgery, before her final teeth. Hers is the earliest story here by some way, so everything she describes is fresh.
Outcomes vary. Christina's story is from the first days after surgery, before her case was finished.
This page was built from the recording of Ep. 60. The quotations are edited to read on the page: filler words taken out, repeated words dropped, a dash for a hesitation or for words left out. Nothing added, nothing reordered, nothing put in the speaker's mouth.