Patient story · Anxiety
'I was walking around with the weight of the world on my shoulders.'
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Crystal had been walking around with the weight of the world on her shoulders.
Before
Crystal wasn't in pain. She was living her life around hiding her teeth.
"I felt that I was walking around with the weight of the world on my shoulders. And I knew that that stress was kind of seeping into my personal life, my professional life."
She was always adjusting.
"I had to modify the way that I spoke, that I smiled. I interacted with people."
That side of the problem doesn't show up on an X-ray, and it's the one most of our patients describe.
The money question, in her words
She's straightforward about cost and doesn't pretend it was small.
"You'll be like, well, the cost up front, it's so much, that's a lot of money to spend. And it is."
Here's how she weighed it.
"For people like me who had such really severe dental issues, the amount of money I would have spent trying to retain my natural teeth probably would have far exceeded the amount I went doing this. And then you still have to deal with any other issues that pop up."
That math won't be right for everyone, because it depends on your own teeth. She worked it through carefully.
Surgery day
She was frightened, and that's normal.
"You sit there and you think, okay, I'm getting all of my teeth extracted, and they're going to be sewing up my gums. And you automatically think, oh my gosh, this is going to be absolutely terrible."
With the sedation, she remembers very little of the day.
"I was sitting there looking like, so this little pill right here is supposed to make me not feel my teeth getting extracted out of my head. And it really did work - I don't even remember getting back to the hotel."
And afterwards:
"I had no pain. I had no pain at all."
The two days of not believing it
What happened next surprised her.
She spent the first two days waiting for the bad part to arrive.
"The first two days you were in denial that there's no way it just went fine."
She kept asking whether everything was really all right. It was, and nothing had been kept from her. She had braced for something that never came, and it took two days to let that go.
After
"The freedom of just not having that anxiety anymore. Now I can walk around and smile as big as I want, and not be afraid to talk to people."
For a while, she says, she went a little overboard.
"I was talking to everybody. I made friends everywhere."
She had her ninety-day check the day she recorded this, and all was well.
Outcomes vary. Crystal had no pain after surgery; many patients do have some, and the recovery pages describe what is normal.
This page was built from the recording of Ep. 39. 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.