I just had a couple problems completed a month or so ago, and for a few weeks I could actually chew food without pain or worrying about losing a temporary crown.
But of course that couldn’t last long. Late last week I’m eating lunch, and I feel/hear a crack or snap, and it feels like somebody fired a roofing nail into my lower jaw. It looks like an old metallic filling has failed, so back to the dentist I go. And away goes a few more hundred dollars, since my dental insurance is about as useful as plastic tits on a blind lizard.
No joke, I’ve been at the place so much the last year or so the last time I was leaving, one of the receptionists was just coming into the office and greeted me by name, like Norm coming into Cheers.
Anyway, sorry about that. I had something similar to me happen a couple years ago to a back molar I had filled as a teenager. I was eating Doritos and the filling broke open and one of the pointy edges of the chips was positioned *just so as to jam right on the now exposed nerve ending.
That’s a…really special kind of pain, right there.
It seems to be old fillings breaking down that are my primary problems, so it’s a bunch of different teeth. I just Googled how long amalgam fillings generally last, and the average seems to be about 12 years. The ones that have been breaking on me I think are like 30 years old, so maybe I should be happy with how much use I got out them instead of whining like a little bitch…
You can whine about crappy teeth all you want - what’s not to whine about? It really sucks, it hurts like crazy when the teeth are bad and it hurts when you’re getting them fixed, it’s really expensive to fix, the fixes don’t last so you have to fix them again and again, they stick fricking needles in your fricking mouth - complain away, my friend.
Yeah, dental pain really seems out of proportion compared to pain in other parts of the body. I’d start a GQ thread asking about the evolutionary purpose, if any, behind it, but I don’t wish to talk about it until I’m done with my current issue. Beyond bitching about it here.
I find it helps to think about something soothing while undergoing these procedures. Something that will whisk you away from the everyday, so you can associate the pain with this calming experience, rather than trauma. Something redolent of smoothness, sleepers, travel … yes, I’m talking about trains and dental meditation.
I had two old gray fillings that I wanted gone, and my dentist was more than happy to drill them out and replace them with composite. Maybe you could do something similar over the next couple of cleaning appointments or something, so you’re rid of fillings that will probably soon fail anyway, and you’ll have nice, tooth colored fillings in their place, knowing they won’t cause trouble for quite a while. Just a thought. It’s not fun, but maybe less painful than have another filling fail.
Sorry you’re having issues. Dental pain really is no joke.
Amalgam fillings are from Satan. No seriously. They are true evil, and not just because of the mercury, they have to drill a shit ton of tooth out to be able to use them, which weakens the tooth, forever.
It’s fucking evil. The sooner you get all the mercury out and modern fillings in, the better. And fuck any dentists who still uses amalgam fillings. It’s barbaric.
Last year, we spent a whole bunch of money to get my teeth fixed. The entire process sucked big time. Last weekend, a crown fell off one of my teeth that had gotten fixed in the past and now I’m back in his chair.
I did that a few years ago - every time I needed a new filling in one quadrant of my mouth, they replaced all the old amalgam fillings in that section at the same time. I have purty tooth-coloured fillings now.
Amen. Since the beginning of the year : a crowned tooth broke and had to be extracted, another tooth with a filling broke too (and I needed a root canal) and since yesterday I have a pain in another crowned tooth, so I expect it will have to be extracted too.
I don’t think I had a whole year free of dental problems during the last 15 years or so.
What sucks is that there’s a sort of progression - first filling, second filling, and then a crown, because usually when the fillings start to fail, decay starts around the margins, and the dentists have to widen the drilled-out area. Eventually, this gets too big to support a filling, so they go with a crown.
I had my first big set of fillings at about 12, and then again in my mid-20s (12 years!), and then again in my mid-late 30s, I got a set of crowns because that second set of fillings had worn out.
The good news, I guess, is that crowns are much less problematic than fillings; they may occasionally pop off, but they can be reglued in many cases.
The real problem is the drill and fill still used by many dentists. Drilling out the small area when decay first starts, and bonding a non toxic filling to the tooth eliminates almost all of the real problems with weakened teeth. If your Dentists still uses mercury, leave them. Now. Mercury fillings are fucking evil. Period.
Yes, but the root canals have their own set of problems, an issue fought tooth and nail (pun intended) by those who do root canals.
Which we will now see in this topic. As any critics of root canals are viciously slandered and attacked for even mentioning the problems. Myself, I will have a tooth removed before having a root canal. I can deal with a missing tooth, but the chronic infection from a bad root canal is for life.
