Patient story · Traveling
'A tech told me, when the doctor was out of earshot: this won't last.'
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Justin, a soccer coach, was warned by a tech at another practice that his old fillings would not last.
Before
Justin's teeth didn't fail the way you might expect.
"Teeth like mine, you know, which are like half of them were broken at like the gum line."
The trouble was old fillings along the gum line. He had been warned, though not by his dentist.
"I remember a tech one time telling me, when the doctor was out of earshot: this won't last. Just so you know."
The warning was right. The fillings were failing from behind, with decay running underneath them and into the nerve in places.
It was easy to ignore because it didn't hurt.
"A tooth would break and there wasn't any pain. You would think if a tooth broke off at the gum line you'd feel it - but I guess the nerve was already dead."
So he did what most people do.
"A few months would go by, nothing would happen. And I would just sort of, easy to live in denial for a while."
Deciding
He did his research, and in the end it was a person who convinced him.
"I was looking for some people that would - and everybody says this - but I got talking to [another patient] a lot in particular."
For him, that mattered more than anything else he read. You have to trust the person working in your mouth, and only people who've been through it can tell you what it's like.
The week
He was more worried about the first night without teeth than the surgery. It turned out to bother him least.
"I see now, going through the process - I don't see how you could that first night. You have to be able to manage the bleeding and have the gauze there and let the gums do whatever they're going to do."
He woke the next morning swollen and assumed it would delay everything.
"I thought, gosh, they're probably gonna send me back home and say - we can't put the teeth in yet. You have too much swelling."
We didn't. His teeth went in, and he stopped noticing the swelling.
"Once they went in, that was the end of that feeling like the gums were swollen. And that was the end of any bleeding."
He went into sedation curious, not frightened, and never felt a thing.
"Like I was really trying to figure out, like, when are they done with that tooth and moving on to another tooth? When am I going to feel like a little sense of pressure? When am I going to feel a release as a tooth comes out? I never did."
How much time it took
Justin added it up while he was still in the chair.
Surgery day was about two hours. The following morning was an hour, with a further half hour that same afternoon. The next morning was around forty minutes. The final fit added roughly another hour.
That's about five and a half hours, spread across a week, for a full mouth.
"The human mind is capable of imagining any scenario as so much worse than it turns out to be."
Since
Justin told his story during the week itself. Most of the stories here come one to four years later, so his gives you a view from the middle of it.
Outcomes vary. The time Justin's case took was right for his case. Yours will depend on your own scan and circumstances.
This page was built from the recording of Ep. 21. 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.