Patient story · Years later
Four years later: 'I bawled my eyes out'
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Dawn, four years on.
Before
Dawn kept getting infections, and her face would swell.
"I was just miserable and unhappy - it just was too many infections. It's like, whatever it takes, let's get it done."
She had already given up on keeping her teeth. She had a denture made and paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, then couldn't bring herself to go through with it.
"I don't think I could ever live with dentures."
Her daughter changed her mind. The two of them decided to do it together and came down to Florida over the Fourth of July.
The surgery
She had wanted to be put under completely, and we talked her into oral sedation instead.
"I was nervous because I originally wanted anesthesia. I wanted to be knocked out — I can’t believe how well the medication worked."
She remembers almost nothing of the day, apart from one phrase.
"Don, can you open your mouth. That's my number one memory. But not much else."
Her advice for anyone about to go through it is to bring headphones and something you love to listen to. She got through a whole album.
The week
She needed only two prototypes.
"When they put the teeth in, I bawled my eyes out. I'm like, oh my God, I have teeth again. And they're nice."
She was black and blue that week and went shopping anyway.
"I don't care. I'm going to show the smile off."
Four years on
In four years she has needed one adjustment and has had no implant problems.
The 90-day soft diet was easier than she expected, partly because she had been eating soft food for years already. Steak came back. So did ice cream, which she had not been able to eat before because her teeth were too sensitive to the cold.
She finds cleaning easy, and better than what she had before.
"It was delightful, because it wasn't painful. It really hurt to brush my teeth prior."
She swears by her handheld water flosser.
"My best friend is Waterpik. With that you can get anything out. Nothing gets stuck."
What she comes back to most is that her teeth stopped feeling like something she was wearing.
"It comes naturally, because they are your teeth. You're one with the teeth."
She comes back once a year for her maintenance visit, and the family turns it into a trip.
Where she is
She was born in Buffalo, New York, and was there for the blizzard of 1977. The family moved to Texas when she was about eight, then to Pennsylvania, where she has been ever since. She lives there with her husband, who is a carpenter, and one of her sons runs a landscaping business.
She is, in her own words, done with the snow.
Outcomes vary from person to person.
This page was built from the recording of Ep. 48. 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.