On Being Old and Needing New Teeth

In My Humble Opinion
1

If this belongs in Factual Questions will someone please suggest moving it to a Mod?

The years have passed and I find myself being offered Senior Discounts. I have a variety of Old Lady Syndromes, aches, and pains. Fine. I’m 62 and I have earned every grey hair on my head. This new development however, puts a fear in me nothing else has. My teeth, always hard and bright, have begun to fail. To make a long, painful story shorter, I have come to the conclusion that it’s time to trade these in for a Tupperware set. (One of my late father’s oft repeated turn of phrase.)

Living on a limited budget and having crap insurance I know that I am not eligible for any of the shiny, new dental options. I am researching having them yanked and replaced, what I am looking for here are anecdotal tales as to what I may, or may not, have in my near future. I am assuming I will be sent to the Dental School over at the UofW as that is where my last extractions took place. So my dental phobia isn’t as bad as usual, I had the head of the Dental School do the last couple of issues and things went as smoothly as could be hoped for.

Please share your experiences so I might avoid a situation. I consider pain to be a situation, so please be as real with me as to what degree of pain I may expect. Mostly I am feeling old, and with the last few falls I have had, with the subsequent assistance and healing, I am apprehensive.

Thanks in advance

2

I got a lower plate at age 30. I don’t believe this is ever warranted but, too late now.
They removed a few once, few next time, then the final one they removed the front ones and installed it.
There wasn’t a lot of pain, but sadness at the loss.
It felt weird to have this object in my mouth.
Hope you get a good dentist.

3

The one thing my dentist told me is that lower dentures are more likely to come out of place, which is why he usually tries harder to save bottom teeth, even though doing that is usually more expensive than dentures. Top teeth, hell usually recommend replacing with dentures once the cost gets high enough.

4

I cannot give any experience on the pain issue. What I can address is possibly a peripheral issue, but that’s the best I can do.

Don’t worry about not having good insurance. The reason I say this is because there is no such thing as good dental insurance. If the types of plans sold as dental insurance were sold as insurance in any other field, both the insurance companies and the insurance agents would be investigated for all manner of crimes and bad-faith dealings.

There is approximately a 97% chance that you are better off financially not having any dental insurance at all. Your best bet is most likely going to be having the work done at the dental school you mention. Failing that, I would strongly encourage you to look into getting a dental discount/savings plan, and finding a dentist that participates.

5

It’s hard to say how much pain will be involved because to some extent, that will depend on how much pain you have now. I didn’t find the extractions and denture process all that painful - but that’s because some of my teeth were so loose that eating was painful and there were some foods that I hadn’t been able to eat for a couple of years. ( not just things like ribs or corn on the cob, but even sandwiches)

6

Extractions are likely the worst part of the process. They’ll also insert dentures immediately to close up your guns for at least 24 hours, at least on the uppers. I’ve heard that part was tough on some people. Following that it takes time following extractions for your mouth to adjust and it can change shape making dentures ill fitting and painful. Some people will hate them until they get a second pair made by another dentist. They could just go back to the first dentist for a reline but they’ll reject that idea out of hand and blame the dentist for their pain instead of the changing shape of their gums.

None of it has to be that bad, I can’t say from my own experience because I got my first dentures as a teenager and by the time the last tooth was gone 50 years later nothing much happening in my mouth made any difference to me. But dentures aren’t all that bad, top plates will stay pretty secure in your mouth and there are options for sticky stuff to keep the lowers in place.

Best of luck to you with this.

7

Hmm. My dental insurance completely pays for (basic) dentures and teeth removal. It’s repairing teeth (beyond the basic fillings and cleanings) that they don’t want to pay for. They’d rather you just rip 'em all out.

8

Your dental insurance completely pays for those things because you have been lucky enough to find a dentist who accepts your insurance as payment in full for those things. When I had dental insurance , it was impossible for me to find a dentist who both accepted my insurance and was taking new patients. So what usually happened would be something like my dentist charges $1000 for an upper denture and my insurance paid $580 or my dentist charges $75 for an exam and the insurance pays $22. This is why I don’t have dental insurance anymore - it was one thing when it was free through my job , but now that I have retired , it would cost me about $70/month.

9

I live in the UK, so benefit from Universal Health Care.
It doesn’t cover everything, but it’s immensely reassuring.

My personal experience is that I needed various fillings throughout my life, but that my dentists were very good at avoiding pain.
Now I’m 69, I have had several upper teeth fail and so I now have a denture to fill the gap.
It was expensive (£700), but is a superb fit and I can eat anything with confidence.

Best of luck to you!

10

Wow, I’m really surprised at how many relatively young people (and actual young people!) who’ve had lost teeth or had dentures. Barring something like a car accident where your face hit the windshield, how did it happen?

I have two fillings. I’ve only lost one permanent tooth – my farthest back left upper molar (it was cracked, and I decided agains a root canal based on the position of the tooth. I don’t miss it) – and no real problems with my other teeth. I’m 70, close to 71. I do brush and floss. Is it simply genetics?

11

Oh, it wasn’t luck. I had to look it up online and ultimately ask around to find the dentist who would accept it.

It’s not students, but they do specialize in cheap dentistry and dentures.

12

My teeth were soft. I couldn’t bite a chunk off an apple. But dentures? It should be a last resort. Plus I had a crappy dentist.

13

I was lucky then. Dentures do sound like a pretty extreme solution.

14

Yeah, I did those things too. Didn’t find one that would accept it and was taking new patients.

15

For me, gum disease. I brushed and flossed and got more professional cleanings than is usual. I assume it had something to do with genetics because my mother also had gum problems.

16

I figured genetics must have been a large part of it.

17

Had almost all mine pulled in the same morning about 4-5 years ago now after diabetes and not super diligent care did a number on them. (And genetics, too, lots of males without teeth in my family) Not great insurance, kind of the standard policy companies offer, cost about $15k to have them pulled, get full dentures made, and have two implants put in to hold the bottom denture in place.

The bone was already so far gone it didn’t take much to yank the teeth out, I think he pulled whatever I had left at the time, 28, I think, in under 30-minutes. Not much pain involved, but they could still write prescriptions with opioids, so that helped. To help with swelling, I held a lot of ice cream and cold drinks against my gums. When I went for my first follow-up he commented that the swelling was a lot less than he was expecting.

Went home wearing the new dentures (not mounted yet) and packed with the gauze. It was mandatory to leave them in to help with the bleeding and the swelling.

I had the full sized screws put in, not the minis, and that healing process took a bit because I managed to crack the bone around one of them as they were healing. That implant was pulled (looked like he was used a standard rachet wrench to unscrew it), the bone allowed to heal, and then about a month, maybe two, later he screwed the thing back into the bone. After that, a few more months to let the bone heal again.

Was about a 10-month process when all was said and done and I am very happy with the results. Not quite as good as my natural teeth but I can eat ribs and corn on the cob.

It would be nice to have the top on posts, but it doesn’t give me much trouble and if I need to make sure it is secure a little denture cream does the trick.

However, the months with the bottom denture not being securely mounted was rough. It doesn’t have much to brace against and it would come off if you breathed a little to deeply. I sneezed and damn near lost the thing!

Point being, it could be expensive, but you want to swing at least an all-on-two mounting for the lower. Maybe the dental college has a better price, the kids have to learn how to do implants somewhere. From a quality of life standpoint it is worth it.

Edited to add: It is also a great way to lose weight since you can’t eat much but very soft foods for the first four to eight weeks as the bone grows around the implants. I dropped about 20-lbs! Woot!

18

Truth!

I don’t know that we’ll pursue any kind of dental insurance when we retire in a few years; both my husband and I have it through our employers, and we maintain double coverage, because we have both needed expensive work on occasion and it MAY be worthwhile. But the cap is 2,000 a year. A couple of fillings eats up most of that. Implants have been handled by having part of the work done late in one calendar year, and the rest during the next year, because of that cap. And anesthesia is not considered necessary, beyond local.

Back to the original question: No personal experience - though I’m somewhat surprised I still have most of my teeth (have had #2 and #14 molars replaced with bionics). My mother had fairly awful teeth - had all her upper teeth extracted when she was in her late 40s, and got a denture. She managed fine, though she mentioned that some words were a little harder to pronounce with that thing in (“Coke” was one she used as an example).

She later went for implants - but unfortunately passed on between the time the implant hardware was placed, and the time they made the replacement upper teeth. So I can’t speak to how that would have worked out; I suspect it’s a somewhat different experience than my one-off replacements (not that, from what you said, it would be in the budget anyway).

19

Didn’t hit a windshield. Went over the front end of my bicycle at age 10 and landed on my mouth. More accurately I landed on my chin which was driven up into my upper jaw, breaking it, knocking 4 teeth completely out and damaging more. It got more complicated after that.

20

Ugh. How awful. Poor kid you.