Patient story · Years later
'Coming from infection after infection, it was nothing.'
Hear it on the podcast
Michelle, after infection after infection.
Before
For Michelle, it was one infection after another.
"Coming from like infection after infection..."
Keep that in mind when she talks about recovery. She's comparing it with what she had been living with.
How she checked us
She looked into us the way she looks into everything: on Reddit.
"So I went on Reddit - and then it clicked that you were here in Boca."
She was sure there had to be a catch, so she went looking for one.
"I searched and searched. I did my due diligence. I couldn't find anything bad about him."
She also read back through Dr. Noorthoek's own past comments there before she made the appointment.
What frightened her
Two things scared her, and neither was the surgery itself.
The first was being awake.
"I was one of those people that was super hesitant about not being put to sleep. I've had a lot of bad experiences with pain with dental stuff - it took some reassuring that it was going to be fine."
The second is a fear many people have and rarely say out loud. She worried about what people would think of her mouth.
"If you are insecure about your mouth and you go into a dentist, you leave thinking - oh my God, what is he saying about me? Maybe that's the worst case he's ever seen."
What she read online only made it worse. So many people carry this fear, and it keeps them away from the dentist for years.
Surgery and the week
"It wasn't - you know what, it was not even that bad."
She's comparing it with years of infections.
What she ate
"Ice cream. That was basically it. Mashed potatoes, applesauce."
And then, like most people:
"I was kind of cheating, but not really - pulling tiny pieces off the chicken tender or whatever. I was just trying to get a taste of something that wasn't ice cream."
Patients often confess this expecting to be scolded. The soft diet is about how hard you bite, more than what's on your plate. Pulling a small piece off something tender is fine. Biting into it is the risk.
A year later, and the part she found hardest
Michelle has had her final teeth for over a year. Recently she needed a reline, which meant a few days back in temporary teeth.
"I was in temporaries for like two or three days a couple of weeks ago, and that was hard. It was hard to switch back into - oh yeah, I can't really eat anything."
She calls the surgery manageable. Going back to temporaries for a few days, after a year with her real teeth, was the hard part.
One lingering habit
"Every once in a while I'll go to swish with water from my water bottle that I know is ice water, and my brain goes, oh, don't swish with that, it's going to hurt."
Her new teeth aren't sensitive to cold. Her brain just hasn't caught up yet.
Outcomes vary. Michelle is comparing recovery with her years of infections, not saying recovery is painless. The recovery pages describe what is typical.
This page was built from the recording of Ep. 41. 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.