Oh no, not another dental posting

WARNING: The following blog entry contains graphic descriptions of a tooth extraction procedure, followed by a photo of the extracted tooth. Reader discretion is advised.

So I have this tooth (lower rear molar) that has been nothing but trouble--a large filling, intermittent pain, a root canal, still intermittent pain, a gum boil that needed treatment with antibiotics--I detailed the root canal procedure earlier in my blog.

Anyway, the tooth had been especially sensitive to pain recently; I took a close look in the mirror, and... whoah... the whole thing was cracked. I could actually catch my fingernail on the edge. Yikes.

So I got a dentist appointment; he agreed that it needed to come out. Extraction actually went really smoothly--I was in and out of the office in a bit more than half an hour. The roots were conical (all pushed together), as opposed to splayed, which made it easier; all came out in one piece. I apologized to the dentist that his efforts on the root canal went to waste--he appreciated that sentiment a lot.

The rest of the day was mostly uneventful--some soreness, treated with Advil. There was the unpleasant experience of huffing and puffing up a hill on my bike, while trying to keep my teeth clenched on the gauze on the socket, and my nose mostly stuffed up by allergies. I was worried I would be waking up on the sidewalk, tangled in my bike.

It's mostly a relief to finally have that tooth out--I figured it was never going to be quite right. Also, the concept of root canal treatments bothered me a bit--"let's build a treehouse in this dead, filled-in tree!" The crack had propagated all the way to the root (vertical crack)--there's no way to recover a tooth in that condition. But it's a bit sad that I maintained a piece of my body poorly enough that it had to be removed.

The plan is to have an implant installed there in a few months (man... if I had two teeth to treat like this, I'd have no end of fun talking about 'my implants' in public). In the meanwhile, it's soup and ice cream for the next few days for me, while the socket heals up.

Oh yeah... I promised gory photos. Here ya go.




In the previous blog posting, the picture showed the big-ass filling on the top; the crack ran around the perimeter, and fore and aft from there. The light orange is the gutta percha used in the root canal treatment (i.e., where they drilled out everything alive in the tooth). The dark rod is the applicator (I think that's what it was called), put in during RCT. The pink is, um, I think chunks of my gum or the ligament holding the tooth in.

Incidentally, my repaired camera came back today--all done under warranty by Minolta. Yay.