Getting a wisdom tooth taken out

Factual Questions
1

The dentist tells me I need to get one of my wisdom teeth taken out because it’s become “symptomatic.” *

I was all set to schedule an appointment with the surgeon, when, this morning, I realized my tooth had stopped causing me any pain. All problems have apparently gone away.

So, look. I don’t want to get my tooth removed. I saw what they did to my wife. It wasn’t pretty.**

I know, I know, people have this done all the time, it’s perfectly normal and safe. But what happened to my wife, it was, it was… horrific.

So please convince me to do the right thing, if the right thing it be. Tell me the worst. What happens if I just keep my wisdom teeth all in. What horrible nightmares might I be causing for myself?

-FrL-

*i.e. it had started to cause me some discomfort, both in the surrounding teeth and gums and the nearby cheek area.

**I could hear her from the next room over screaming and crying in pain as they (as she described it) “scraped” her teeth out over the course of an hour or two. The the doctors kept griping at her to be quiet so she wouldn’t scare the children. And she wept, hunched over in pain all the way home. And she collapsed to the floor unresponsively writhing and moaning in pain once we got home, and stayed that way for a long time. And the pharmacy for some reason took several hours to fill the pain medication prescription, which I assume is not normal but still. It was awful. :mad:

2

I’d say either

  1. Your wife is a huge crybaby. Or… 2) That doctor didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

I’ve had all 4 of mine removed (2, then 1, then 1) by 3 different dentists/oral surgeons. Lots of pressure but very, very little pain if any. Root canals are far worse IMHO.
Your jaw is sore for a day or so afterwards but the pain pills they give subscribe take care of it pretty well.

3

No.

She is more sensitive to pain than I am. But, as you yourself report, (and as I didn’t know, btw,) she wasn’t supposed to be feeling any pain at all.

Anyway, she is not the sort who would scream and cry over a little hurt. She describes it as the most horrific agony she has ever experienced. She prefers to have a little cry and quickly get over things. She would not prolong something like this unless she were seriously, seriously hurt.

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So that’s a little encouraging.

But anyway, what happens to me if I don’t get this one (and the others should the need seem to arise) taken out?

-FrL-

4

I’ve got the same problem as the OP (except for gum pain) but my dentist told me I could choose whether or not to have the wisdom teeth removed. Every so often I’ll get a headache and my inner cheek will be raw, I’ll consider scheduling an appointment, then all symptoms will disappear. If this happened more than once a month and I was promised good meds, I’d probably have them yanked.

Was your wife’s tooth impacted? Because then it’s a matter of smashing the tooth and scraping it out (rather than ‘simple’ extraction). I think.

ETA I did ask what could happen if I kept my teeth. The good: they apparently won’t move the other teeth out of place, as I’d suspected. The bad: because it’s harder to brush back there, wisdom teeth are more likely to get cavities, which could affect the back molars.

5

Neither you nor your wife are going back either to that doctor, or the dentist who referred her to him, right? I’ve never heard of wisdom tooth removal being that painful.

6

I just had a broken tooth extracted and a titanium helicoil drilled into my jawbone. For neither procedure did I bother to fill the pain medicine prescriptions. I’d vote that your wife’s doctor was a hack. Go see someone else.

7

I’d have to say that the doctor your wife saw didn’t know what he was doing, AND was an insensitive jerk. I’ve worked for a dentist. If people are crying in pain, you don’t yell at them, you fix it.

I don’t know exactly what could happen if you don’t have it removed, but being nonsymptomatic* now is actually a good thing. Get your teeth worked on when you’re not having pain – it’s a lot easier than getting them worked on when you’re in agony because you’ve ignored something.

*Speaking of which, are you on anything? If you’ve been prescribed antibiotics and told to get an appointment, you may be messing with your scheduling. Dentists/oral surgeons often arrange for you to be on antibiotics when oral surgery is scheduled to alleviate pain and keep risk of infection low. If you wait, you may have to take another course of antiobiotics before your surgery. If you’re not on anything, of course, ignore this.

8

I was once in the same situation as you. I had pain, made an appointment, and the pain went away, so I cancelled the appointment. I woke up early one morning in so much pain that I had to go to the emergency room. It took forever to get another appointment, because the surgeon worked at several different locations.

There wasn’t much pain as long as I took the medication, and there was no pain during the removal. I had all four removed at different times, and the only problem was when the drug store misplaced my prescription and took about six hours to fill it.

9

The pain WILL come back, if the pain was due to an abcess. What’s happened in that case is that the nerve the infection was chewing away at has died, so it doesn’t hurt anymore. Sooner or later it will start to eat through another. Or perhaps several more at the same time. Which, as you might imagine, is worse.

Ask me how I know this.

10

Sounds like you’ve got a bad dentist. When I had all four of mine taken out at the same time, it was trivial. Normally, I’m something of a baby when it comes to dental work.

When I made the appointment for the procedure, I got a prescription for analgesics, so I had pills in my hot little hands before getting into the chair. More importantly, I had one in me before I got into the chair, so any residual pain that might slip past the novocaine was going to be quickly clobbered before it had a chance to put down roots, so to speak.

After that, the dentist was a wizard - he studied the xrays and saw which way the roots were twisting. Then, he sawed the teeth into sections so he could give each root segment the appropriate twist to unscrew them from my jaw, rather than brute-force yanking them out.

This was done mid-afternoon, and I was able to go back to work the next day.

11

Well, I don’t think they’re going to get better.

If your not feeling any pain now but did before it’s bound to come back. Sort of like ignoring a cavity that hurt one day but went away the next, the next time it hurts again it’s usually worse.

“Problematic” could mean several things. It’s pushing on your other teeth, it’s scraping the side of your mouth, it’s already decaying and it needs to go, etc.

If I were you I’d get the medication in advance, make sure you have someone to drive you home, take the next day off of work to sleep in, and buy some Slimfast/Ensure for food since you aren’t going to be chewing anything for a couple days.

12

Good lord. :eek: What kind of barbaric dental school dropouts did your wife patronize?

This is bullshit. I don’t know ANY reputable health care practitioners, of any specialty, who would respond like this to a patient in obvious pain. I sincerely hope you’ve moved your business to another practice by now. I can recommend a very good dentist and a wonderful oral surgeon here in Central Illinois, if it’s not too far to drive.

I’ve had wisdom teeth removed twice, by an oral surgeon (which is what you want if x-rays show the roots are not perfectly straight, not a dentist), and both times “you’ll have a shot to knock you out” general anesthesia was the basic assumption. Allowing the patient to remain awake during the procedure wasn’t even considered.

If you’re “out” during the procedure (and frankly I can’t imagine NOT being “out”, because removing wisdom teeth is surgery, not a simple extraction), it’s no biggie. Find a different dentist who will recommend you to an oral surgeon, who does this sort of thing all the time.

Afterwards, the worst part was not the pain, which was readily manageable with a day’s worth of Tylenol 3, but having to rinse your mouth out with salt water at periodic intervals, which was a minor PITA.

Me: “Excuse me, I have to go rinse my mouth out with salt water…”
Other person: “…?”

And impacted wisdom teeth are nothing to mess around with, since if untreated, you can end up with bad things happening. According to the Mayo Clinic, the time to seek a dentist is when they hurt–it doesn’t say, “…but if it stops hurting, call the dentist and tell him never mind.”

So find somebody else and get it taken care of.

13

The hell? I’ve never heard of such pain with wisdom teeth either. I didn’t feel a thing. Over the following 24 hours my jaw was a little sore, but a bag of ice took care of it. My buddy even sang a concert eh day his wisdom teeth were pulled.

The OP’s dentist is a sadist!

Your experience will depend on whether or not your tooth is impacted and the shape of the roots. Mine came out with minimal cutting required because they weren’t impacted and the roots shaped in some way that made it easier.

ETA: Mine weren’t even symptomatic, but they eventually would have started rotting in my face. I figured I’d get them pulled before any real infection set in that would hurt or complicate extraction.

14

Your dentist’s last name wouldn’t be “Szell,” by any chance?

15

My wisdom teeth weren’t hurting, but they were crowding the other teeth, so all four had to be removed. I had it done on my lunch hour, and went right back to work. The pain was minimal.

16

Dentists should be able to control the pain to the point that the needle is the only pain you feel for the 3 seconds it’s in your mouth. All this talk about fear of excruciating pain at the dentist is horrifying, because the dentist is the guy/gal who can stop your pain. Pulling, pressure, slight discomfort and being annoyed by the mess that is dentistry is one thing. Pain? I’d consider the guy a hack and move on. Ask around. Word of mouth and all that. Puns are a bonus.

Root canal pain? They numb the nerve then friggin’ kill it. If there is a procedure that should be pain free, it’s a root canal!

17

My brother had an impacted wisdom tooth. His cheek swelled up to half the size of his whole face and he was in terrible pain.

So when it was recommended that I have mine removed, since my jaw wasn’t big enough for them, I was glad to comply. I was awake, with both novocaine and laughing gas. Absolutely no pain, and the laughing gas made the whole procedure entirely stress-free. As I recall, I decided that the lamp looked like a dinosaur’s eye, the sound of the roots breaking (the root of one tooth was wrapped around the jawbone) was moderately interesting, and I had all sorts of seemingly profound thoughts that vanished as soon as the nitrous was taken away. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

It was a bit sore the next day, and I discovered that pain was preferable to the nausea and disorientation codeine caused, but the pain was no big deal. An excuse to lounge on the couch with a book.

Get a better dentist who can recommend a good oral surgeon, and go for it. I hope your wife hass recovered from the trauma by now.

18

I put off having my wisdom teeth removed for, oh, about 10 years out of fear. That and the fact that they weren’t causing any trouble. Initially. Then they got cavities. Then one of them was partically impacted and the surrounding gums became inflamed. The writing was on the wall - they had to go.

I had two completely unmedicated births and was still afraid to have those teeth pulled.
I never had any painful dental work, and was still afraid to have those teeth pulled.
I was just plain not wanting to experience having those teeth pulled.

I made the appointment and read up on people’s experiences here, looking specifically for the positive ones. (there were many)

I had the teeth pulled under conscious sedation and never felt a thing. I never needed the pain pills, and the worst thing about recovery were that the stitches were a nuissance.
It really was a case where I wondered what I had been so worried about. It was a piece of cake!

19

I have a high pain tolerance and mine ended up terrible as well. I am not sure why but mine had to be done under general anesthesia. The first few days afterward, I ws Ok but wasn’t supposed to eat and I couldn’t really anyway. Day 4 was when the trouble started. I got dry socket which is an infection in the hole where the teeth used to be. It was literally one of the most painful experiences in my life but I tried to tough it out for some reason. It got to the point where I was screaming and doing things like stabbing myself with needles just to experience a different kind of pain for a while. Finally, I got an appointment with the oral surgeon a couple of days later and my jaw had basically locked up by that time and I couldn’t open my mouth more than a half inch or so no matter how hard I tried. The surgeon took a look and got pissed that I couldn’t open my mouth enough. He got the nurse to hold me down and took both of his hands and pried my mouth open by force. It hurt so badly that I thought that I was going to pass out.

A week or so later everything was great though.

20

You guys are all chickens. :stuck_out_tongue: I got all four of my wisdom teeth plus the four teeth behind my canine teeth taken out within half an hour. I didn’t feel much other than the sensation of the teeth sliding out. I didn’t even take any of the pain meds afterwards, but my face was swollen for 3 days.

Frylock, you have to be a real man or your man card will be revoked. Just for talking about your fear, you are going to have to get your wisdom teeth taken out with only whiskey to comfort you.