Hey Thom,
Sounds like you have a mouthful of work to be done, pardon the pun. Wow. Over 4 hours keeping your mouth open. Your jaw must be tired. Hope you get it all fixed very quick.
I'm well over halfway there now. He literally did everything to the right of the centerline of my skull. That's where most of the facially-visible dental atrocities were committed, so it did the world of good.
It actually wasn't all that bad, Bob. We all (the dentist, two assistants, and myself) had each other's body language down in pretty quick order, so I knew when I could rest my jaw, and they all knew when the swallow reflex was getting ready to kick in (not that they weren't diligent about the suction guns, but they
all had their hands full with me yesterday).
I go back in on the 5th to have the
other steel crown pried off to get a look at what's still under there. Stainless steel crowns are good for a year or so, this one (and the one that busted open over the tooth I just lost) has been in since I was 14.
I'm 34 now.
I was in the chair for nearly 2 hours. The thing that made the job difficult was he told me I had long roots that were curved. So that required a boat load of bone grinding to expose the roots. The bone had to be ground down because the back side of the tooth caused a large amount deterioration to the bone so grinding was in the works anyway. The good news is the rest of my teeth are OK fine. The thing that got me all torqued up was I essentially had perfect teeth and this came out of the blue. But the doc indicated that the tooth was cracked so it wasn't from neglect.
Damn. I was lucky, and mine was from neglect. The crown split about two years ago, and I kept telling myself I'd find a dentist and get it fixed.
Then the tooth broke into three crowns and six or seven root segments.
This was my first time seeing this dentist, and the combination of painless extraction, state of the art technology being put to good use, and a mixture of pride/perfectionism in his work and passion about his science are the reasons I've been going back on such a regular basis and paying this kind of cash.
He raked out the socket with a spoon for a few minutes, and told me I'd just dodged the infection bullet. I'll be damned if he wasn't right. Didn't even need ibuprofen afterwards. Gum was a little sore, that's it.
Mind you, this was a secondary molar. From what you've said so far, I'm guessing yours was a bit more facial so the roots were probably a bit more convoluted.
Got tons of ibuprofen. Also have some hydrocordone. I have no desire to use the pain killers. The ibuprofen seems to holding its own right now. I've been eating ibuprofen for a couple of weeks now. Can't wait to stop taking it and the antibiotics. Just wished the friggin bleeding would stop. Just got to take it easy for a while.
Go up to the usual prescription dose
if you need to, but I won't advocate going any further than that. You're probably already aware of the potential risks to your liver, and sometimes kidneys and/or pancreas. I've also heard lately that the binder doesn't necessarily help with digestive reactions to ibuprofen, so you might be better off getting the prescription itself if you need that much in one dose.
I ate some oxycodone when my molar shattered. Left me really groggy, but in too much agony to sleep. I'd stick to the ibuprofen.
Again: good luck, Bob.
--Thom
Killer Agony One Zipper Got Caught
