Patient story · Both arches, or one
'The top one I've had twenty years. I'm so used to it that it's no problem at all.'
Hear it on the podcast
Evan has worn an upper denture for twenty years and now has a fixed lower, so he can compare the two.
Before
Evan kept getting gum infections, and his teeth had started to move.
"I always had these gum infections. Gum infections and wiggly teeth and all this stuff. And something had to be done."
He'd had his upper teeth done two decades earlier, and it hadn't gone well.
"They pull them all out, and then they say, here, hold this gauze for twenty minutes and you'll be fine, go home. Well, go home, try to sleep, and you got a mouthful of blood, again and again and again."
That ended with an emergency referral to an oral surgeon the same day. It isn't a normal outcome of an extraction, but it's what he had in mind when he thought about doing the lower jaw.
What he would not accept
His local practice proposed the treatment under IV sedation in a dental office.
"I was not comfortable with that idea outside of a hospital setting."
Plenty of people feel the same. It's why he started looking further afield.
What he ruled out
He did his research and ruled out two common approaches.
Getting everything done in a single day:
"That didn't seem right either. Because any mistakes - that's, you know, too bad, get out of here."
And the staged approach with a long gap:
"They do the surgery, and then you have no teeth, nothing, for an extended period until you're all healed up. And then you finally go back and they do the rest of the work. That didn't sound good either. It just took way too long."
Living with one of each
Evan is the only patient here who wears both at once.
He's fair about his upper denture:
"The top one I've had about twenty years. I'm just so used to wearing it that it's really no problem at all. I can talk, I can chew, everything's just fine with that."
If you're deciding, that's worth knowing. A well-fitting upper denture, worn by someone who has fully adapted, can work well, and he says so.
The lower is a different story. A lower denture has no palate to hold on to, and it's the arch that leads most people to implants. His lower is fixed, and it doesn't move.
Eating
He followed the soft-diet instruction literally.
"You guys said that thing about the side of a plastic fork, right? Don't do anything more than that."
And what did he eat? The same thing most patients do:
"Meatloaf and mashed potatoes."
One mouth, two treatments
Evan has lived with both, and he has no reason to flatter either one.
He got used to his upper denture over twenty years. The lower arch was the one he couldn't get used to.
Outcomes vary. Evan's upper denture experience comes after twenty years of getting used to it, and a new denture wearer shouldn't expect the same right away.
This page was built from the recording of Ep. 34. 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.