I had a dental implant started about 3 weeks ago. By this I mean, I had the first stage where the oral surgeon placed the titanium post and we’re giving it 6 months or whatever to ossify.
Or, we were going to give it 6 months to ossify. Because it’s been feeling weird for the past few days but this morning—of course, the Sunday of a long weekend!—I woke up and there’s a huge, painful lump on the gum above it, the post seems to be sticking out more and it’s clear that Something Has Gone Wrong. It almost feels like it has slipped sideways, but I can’t see it and my husband hasn’t woken up yet to look at it for me.
I’ve already called the surgeon’s office and left a message, but I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced early failure of an implant. If so, what happened? Did you have to get it taken care of immediately, or just within a few days? What was removal of it like? Partially I’m wondering what the impact of this might be on my long weekend and work week; partially I’m just curious.
My implants fortunately did not fail, but I broke a tooth next to one of the implants and the tooth got infected. My dentist had a cow when he saw it. He insisted on immediate removal of the infected tooth, because if the ossification area became infected, it basically meant the whole procedure had to be reversed and started again from scratch. In my case that would have been very complicated because I had had a sinus augmentation in anticipation of three implants, and the surgery would have had to be repeated. Your single implant isn’t as complicated as what I had done, but I wouldn’t wait at all to address it. I know it’s a holiday weekend, but if your dentist has an emergency number, I’d suggest calling it and at least letting him know what’s going on.
It may just be an infection. A quick course of antibiotics may clear the problem. Don’t wait too long because they may have to remove the implant if it gets too bad.
I had already called when I posted and he got back to me right away, with a plan to meet at his office within an hour.
Turns out that the little screw-shaped metal plug that was covering the post had slipped, shifted, and was jammed almost sideways in my gum! No wonder I was in pain!
He numbed me up, removed it, and sealed it over. Within a few hours the pain subsided.
I really, really like this dentist. He responded quickly, made certain to look at it before trying to guess what was wrong, and didn’t charge me for the visit.
I had a full set of upper implants. This was back in the early 90s when the technology was still new, so they were a lot more expensive than today. And the procedures were more painful.
If you have one implant and it starts to fail, you can feel it getting loose and painful. But if you have multiple implants and one starts to fail, the other implants provide stability. Because of this, there are no symptoms, so the infection spreads until it’s too late. I wound up losing the entire uppers, and now have to wear a denture. It would have saved me tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of painful surgery if I had just gotten the denture in the first place.
I have no idea how they failed. In spite of taking good care of them, somehow an infections got in and spread all the way around. I wish dentists would inform their patients that the implants aren’t necessarily permanent.
1 week after getting my implants done, i’m noticing the bottom of the screw sticking out of gums. My dentist was horrified (he’s not the one that did the implant).
Left multiple messages on my surgeons line, but no respons yet.