Yesterday was bracket removal day. I was so damn glad to get that metal removed from three of my front teeth. One of the anchor teeth had drifted out a bit and my dentist was going to replace the crown on it for free, he did. BTW I go to Dr. Rose if any of you are looking for a great dentist, he is. But he also has a torture chamber hidden in the inner recesses of his office. That’s where I was taken when I innocently walked in yesterday.

Let’s talk dental. If you don’t want to then get the hell out of here because that’s where this is going. When I was a youngster, we did not have dental care. First, there was never any money and there were eight of us. Second, it wasn’t something that everyone did – routine cleanings, check-ups, and oral hygiene tune ups.  Long and short of it is that we were taken to a dentist when we had a toothache that knocked our eyes out of their sockets and by that time the tooth was beyond saving so it was pulled. I had three or four molars/wisdom teeth pulled by the time I left home. I was one of those fortunate people that had teeth that came in straight and right where they were supposed to, I was unfortunate in the respect that I have very thin enamel and my teeth are extremely sensitive.

After I left home, had my first son and was married to a dental tech in the Navy, I had a lot of dental work done. The Navy wouldn’t take care of dependent’s teeth but if your mate was in the dental corp, they took you in and fixed you right up. They mowed my molars out like canyons from front to back and filled them, and also repaired any cavities I had in my front teeth. Over the years I’ve made it a point to always take care of my teeth with regular cleanings and fillings as needed, etc.

I don’t cringe or shrink when someone mentions a root canal, I’ve have five or six, I also have seven crowns, and dental work is just that, work…a necessity if you want to keep what you have. And I do.

This tooth extraction has been one major screamer though in the art work of fixing teeth. First the brackets went on, three teeth with the middle of the three being the one that is extracted. You have no idea how painful that tooth is as it’s being pulled down – and it affects the teeth around it, not just the teeth that are locked in by metal, but others too. The pressure is continual, the teeth are so sensitive that even chewing something slightly hard that might bump them hurts up into the gum and root. And there is no way that I would even consider trying to eat something that I had to bite into with my front teeth.

After about three weeks of going back in every week to have the back of the teeth (the two crowns that were going to be replaced) ground down because as the evil tooth came down I kept hitting it when I closed my teeth, the bands were adjusted to pull the tooth down further. Bingo! It almost fell out over night…or so it seemed to me. It had been ground off at the bottom to keep it even with the other teeth as it came down, but in a 24 hour period it was very, very, noticeably lower than the line of teeth…and painful as hell. Back to the dentist. I told him if he touched them without giving me a shot first, I’d jump up on top of the TV (suspended from the ceiling). He laughed. He did shoot up my mouth, the roof of it to. Then he grabbed a tool and cracked the tooth loose from the gum to ease the pressure and put it in it’s final phase.

OMG! Pain to the max over the following days, anything that touched the tooth or surrounding teeth sent pain shudders through the root for five minutes or more. At one visit to the dentist when his assistant reached over to toggle the tooth, I put my hand up and said, “I hit people if they even act like they are getting near my mouth.” I was dead assed serious.

So with the tooth stabilizing and me all happy to get the metal off, I took my seat in the torture chamber and got shot up again. One and a half hours later, two temporary crowns in place, I looked in the mirror at my smile (if you could call it that), and said to my dentist, “My gum has dropped way down when the tooth was extracted, will it just go back up normally?”

“I’m glad you saw that now.”

UH-OH!

“Sit down, I need to laser your gum off.”

HOLY SHIT! Off came the crowns, one more shot just to top off the first ones, and away we went. Rebuild the evil tooth’s temporary crown to make it the right size, whittle, carve, tear, scrape…smell your flesh burning…take impressions, take more impressions, and another two hours later I was walking out the door.

There’s no way to describe how painful it was – even after taking pain pills – and it still is. It’s the throbbing, don’t touch me or you’re going to be really sorry thing all over again…only worse. That evil tooth had just started to settle and now it got the shit knocked out of it again. Yeah, it’ll be alright here in a day or so, and yeah, I’m glad I brought it up because I was never going to be happy with the way my gum line and length of teeth looked.

Look, MA! No metal.