I have what my dentist calls receding gums. At 60, the gums are working back which means the teeth have less to hang on to so they start to get loose. It makes it a pain in the arse trying to eat as your teeth hurt.
(This is my interpretation of how it works, actual Dentists need not correct me)
At least part of the problem was me being a smoker for 40+ years. I stopped that recently but too late to save the fangs.
Tomorrow I go in, sit in the chair, get needled up and then the guy is going to pull out his multigrips and pull out 20+ teeth, do a bit of bone grafting and a few stiches then whack in a set of dentures I’d had pre made right onto those messed up gums.
I’m a tad nervous.
The plan is, in a couple of months, I get some xrays or scans and if the bone in the jaws is up to it, get implants and clip the dentures onto them. If not, I stay with the old fashioned falsies.
My husband has had a few individual teeth pulled for similar reasons. He left one with just an empty hole, and got implants for the other two. Both options ultimately worked fine. But maybe that’s too different from your situation to be helpful.
My husband had a similar surgery - most of his top teeth out. Be prepared for a lot of gore and a good deal of pain for the first day or two. He did heal quickly and well, but I think he was surprised at how much the first few days wiped him out.
Yes. I was told my teeth would all need to go eventually, and doing them one or two at a time and getting implants would be more expensive, so why not have the whole set replaced by a series of bridges? Not all at once, but in stages.
I agreed, and shouldn’t have. It is a very long process, longer than you think it will be. After each extraction (not immediately) you get some bone grafts - powdered bone harvested from deceased people. The grafts have to set properly and become viable for implants (metal studs screwed into your jawbone, to which the permanent artificial teeth will eventually be attached). This takes months. You will have temporary teeth put in while the healing takes place, and these can break. This breakage can leave a gap which you need another appointment to replace with another temp which can also break. I actually ended up doing a homemade gap-filler more than once because I got tired of waiting for appointments. I used a plastic art substance called Friendly Plastic, little white beads that you heat in hot water and they merge together into a soft goop you can mold into a gap and which hardens as it cools. It’s surprisingly strong and when solid isn’t a bad color match; is supposedly non-toxic but it’s up to you whether you believe that - I had it in my mouth for long stretches with no problems
Cutting to the chase, the whole process, done in stages, took years and cost a whole lot more than expected, considering I needed two dentists, my regular one and a specialist who did the surgical part. That part was very unpleasant. Painful in spite of numbing injections. In the end, I never really got used to the feel of my new implants. Your bite feels “spongey”. I can certainly eat anything I want, but there’s a certain amount of give that natural teeth don’t have. Also, I started gnashing my teeth semi-involuntarily. Sort of an OCD response to the strangeness of it. I wish I had kept some of my original teeth as long as I could, and dealt with any deterioration when and if they needed it.
It is worth caring for your teeth while you can. I wasn’t very vigilant, and this is the result.
I don’t know about SuntanLotion, but I remember my brother getting all of his pulled at not much older, after a couple of decades of refusing to brush his teeth and refusing to see a dentist (all just to be rebellious, of course). He was a mess afterwards. I don’t think implants were a thing back then, so it was just falsies for the rest of his adulthood.
21 teeth all up. Like Hatchie, the Dentist said around half were loose and need to go now, we could either take the rest now or over the next few years, I chose to do the lot at once.
Now I’ve got the traditional false teeth in as the temporary solution. In a couple of months after everything has healed, I go in for scans to see if I have enough bone to put implants in. If not, we either do some more grafts or I just stick with these.
The idea is to do implant retained dentures where they stick 4-6 screws in the top jaw and4 in the bottom and clip a 1 piece denture onto it.
Not as bulky as old fashioned dentures, no movement while eating and since you can pop them out at night for cleaning, more hygenic than “All on 4” permanent ones.
For now I’ve just got to learn how to eat with these things.