dentist 2021

[mellowtigger]

I finally visited a dentist today. It took a few months of haphazardly calling for appointments before I finally got one.

Dental technology has improved a lot since my last visit, which might have been in 2011. It was the least painful or otherwise disruptive experience that I've ever had at the dentist. They even gave me (unprompted) some dark glasses to wear to avoid the immensely bright spotlight they use. That addition alone contributed a lot to the ease of the experience.

They took a whole lot of (x-ray?) images of my mouth from every possible angle while I sat in the dentist chair, until they had closeups of every region. Very fast and efficient, with an imaging plate that was connected by wire to their computer to receive the images immediately. A difficult process in some cases because I have bony overgrowths in my mouth that prevented easy placement sometimes.

Two things of note:

1) My baby tooth has now become part of my jawbone. The dentist showed me those pictures. Other teeth have a very thin cartilage (I think?) layer separating the root from the jawbone. My baby tooth no longer has any such layer. Even I could see the difference. She said that if the tooth ever needed to be removed, they would have to cut it out. :/ On the plus side, after more than half a century in this body, that baby tooth is going nowhere on its own. :)

2) I've ground my teeth so much through my lifetime that the crown peaks are gone from some of my teeth. She encouraged me to see a sleep specialist office that included dental support. I would benefit from a special kind of mouthguard that avoids the bony sides of my jaws while adding some separation between my upper and lower jaws. It could potentially also help some occasional sleep apnea. Seems worthwhile. I'll look into it.

Otherwise I received good grades for maybe not having been to a dentist in nearly a decade. I need to be more thorough with flossing, especially around that baby tooth with the ill-fitting crown on it.

Comments

[excessor]

Congratulations on getting in to see someone. I don't have a sense of your age, but in general, good dental health correlates to good cardiac health. I once went ten or eleven years without visiting a dentist because of a bad experience with my childhood dentist (ptui!). There has been a sea change in dental family practice and all of it is good; the desire to make it a positive experience is exactly what should have been happening—and that means tinted glasses and enough painkiller that you don't feel anything going on.