I guess this is goodbye, #31

[dreamshark]

I'd like to say that you were a good, loyal old molar. But actually, you were kind of a crappy tooth all along, the bad apple that spoiled the barrel. It's your fault that the lower right quadrant of my mouth ended up with 3 crowned teeth in a row while the other 29 were smugly perfect.  I probably shouldn't have held onto you as long as I did. But bad apple or not, you were MY bad apple. So when they tried to tell me that you just weren't worth saving, I went into denial and kept on enabling and enabling. "There's nothing really wrong with this tooth," I insisted. "It only hurts when I chew on it!"  But technically, that's what molars are for - chewing. And a molar that you can't chew on isn't much of a molar. So I finally gave in and had you extracted today. And the bright side of the mess you made of the neighborhood is: the crowned teeth on either side are ready and willing to support a bridge to replace you.



Hmmm. It looks like the evil Dental Establishment was right all along. It was cracked, right down to the tip of the root.

Comments

[mle292.livejournal.com]

Yikes! I expect that you're ultimately pleased to be rid of it, but I can understand that it must have been a tough call to make.

Thinking back on having my wisdom teeth extracted, it's possibly one of the less horrible dental procedures. I hope this went smoothly and they gave you some nice drugs.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

The tough part was that cracks like this don't show up on X-ray. They have to be deduced from other evidence, none of which is 100% diagnostic. It's all a matter of probabilities. Being a software system tester, I am familiar with this phenomenon and was convinced once they explained their reasoning. But I insisted on taking the tooth with me to examine, and was relieved to see that it was indeed cracked. So yes, right decision.

The extraction was nowhere near as bad as I feared. Partly because they did, in fact, give me tons of my favorite mild hallucinogen. And frankly, Old 31 had lost interest in maintaining its connection to the rest of my mouth quite some time ago and just popped right out. They spent 40 minutes filling me up with nitrous and novocain, and about 90 seconds actually pulling the tooth. Really - I was listening to "Graceland" on my iPod when he finally started the extraction, and still listening to "Graceland" when he finished. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am!

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear it went so smoothly! How long before you are fitted with the bridge?

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I got the temporary bridge today! It doesn't fit extremely well, but at least it covers up the disturbing hole where that tooth used to be. The new bridge should be here in 2 weeks.