Last week I woke up in the middle of the night feeling something in my mouth.
It was a porcelain crown from my tooth!:eek:
Next morning I went to the dentist and he cemented it back on. How/why it got loose I know not. I’ve had it for over 15 years.
I was in a deep sleep before waking. What if I had swallowed the damn thing? Would it pass? Could I have gotten a sepsis?
Can’t see any reason why it would have harmed you. I would have passed through - presumably it could have been collected at the other end, cleaned, sterilised and refitted.
I (apparently) swallowed a loose crown a number of years ago and it had no ill effects. I never noticed it passing through but I assume it had no problem doing so.
Roddy
Then why don’t toothpicks pass through?
:eek:
Like hell it would have been. I don’t care how well it’s cleaned. Something that passed through my intestines and came out of my asshole is not going back into my mouth no matter what! I’m just funny that way.:smack:
Because toothpicks are long, pointy and wooden. They could puncture your insides, or get caught up somewhere, and I imagine wood (although considered indigestible) would eventually be broken down to some extent by stomach acid. A crown, on the other hand, is fairly smooth, rounded and designed to be biologically inert.
Given the choice between having a thoroughly washed and autoclaved “recovered” crown refitted and forking out three grand for a brand new one, well, pass the rubber gloves.
Actually, when I was having an implant fitted, my dentist told me that a colleague of his (yeah right, not him at all!) accidentally dropped a crown in a girl’s mouth and she swallowed it. He gave her a plastic sieve and the promise of a discount and asked her to go into the bathroom and stick her fingers down her throat. She did.
Anyway, going back to your original question, that’s not to say it’s exactly safe having a crown drop out while you sleep. Swallowing it into your stomach is probably no big deal, but you wouldn’t want it to drop down in a lungward direction…
That bites!
I had a relative that swallowed a gold crown several years back, when gold was almost as high as it is now. He spent several days shitting in a 5 gallon bucket to recover it. He gave up looking for it, but a few days later his wife found it at the bottom of their toilet bowl. It was too heavy to flush. He took it in to his dentist, who sterilized it and refit it back into his mouth.
Hah! My son passed a golf tee through his GI system with no harm to the tee or to him. He was an adult when he managed to swallow it.
Because they’re nothing like porcelain crowns. Do you really even need to ask that?
The water molecules you drink and bathe with every day have been drunk and pissed out by thousands of people and animals before your turn.
Eww, does this mean you’d have to poop into a container, then collect it, and go through it? I’m no Ellie Sattler. No way I’m (wo)man enough.
My dentist told me about a client who swallowed a crown, collected it at the end of its journey, and brought it to him for reinstallation. He refused.
Yes, Monsieur Snark, I do. Why cannot the body break down wood, or at very least just pass it through, but can pass through (allegedly) a porcelain crown. What else would cause a sepsis if swallowed. What if I swallowed a golf ball? A toothpick is not like a crown, but the crown is not like a baked potato.
I haven’t drank tap water since 1993.
What, you think bottled water has a Maxwell’s Demon deciding to only let in the “clean” molecules? :smack:
Is that why people go for bottled water? They think it hasn’t interacted with anything?
I think of water like land. God ain’t making any more of it.
No, but the stuff I have delivered can’t possible be worse than the Lake Michigan slop that poisoned me 17 years ago.
I think a typical toothpick is not likely to cause a problem.
It might get caught and perforate the bowel, of course, but on average I think the digestive tract secretions would soften it up and it would, in fact, have a good chance to pass through eventually.
I would definitely try to salvage a crown that passed through. Many mouth flora are nastier than bowel ones, so it seems a bit silly to worry about contamination.
From here:
*
Since nineteen-hundred over seventeen-thousand people have died from toothpicks. Actually **more people die from toothpicks every year than lightening. *And how this happens is that they ingest the toothpick. A toothpick is wood and it cannot be digested, and this causes a sepsis in the blood. One of the most famous incidents is the writer Sherwood Anderson, who was at a cocktail party eating some hors d’ourves, some small frankfurters with a toothpick in it, and during this course he not only swallowed the small hotdog but the toothpick as well. He died five days later from a form of sepsis, from the toothpick.
And there’s the problem. That source is sloppy and wrong. No wonder these questions seem idiotic.
“A toothpick is wood and it cannot be digested, and this causes a sepsis in the blood.”
Toothpick is wood: true. Wood can’t be digested (by humans): true. Not being digestible causes sepsis: false. Not just false, utter horsecrap. Totally ridiculous, how-clueless-do-you-have-to-be-to-swallow-it (heh) horsecrap. Kids eat rocks, dirt, coins, an amazing variety of undigestible stuff and don’t get sepsis. Parts of some foods we eat are undigestible (ever heard of remnants of corn kernels in feces?) and we don’t get sepsis. Stories abound of people swallowing something with the express intent of retrieving it from their stools, and sepsis is never mentioned.
The toothpick/sepsis connection comes from the toothpick perforating some part of the guts. It’s the shape and stiffness that’s the problem, not the material.
X-Ray Tech here. I just wanted to say that I have aken uncountable films of kids/adults that have swallowed various things and felt it an ‘emergency’. Rarely was it truly a problem, and way more often than not, patient was sent home and told to return only if something symptomatic showed up later (bowel obstrucion, feeling ill, whatever).
One memorable time was a fellow that swallowed half a ‘wish-bone’ from a chicken and it got caught in esophagus on its way to stomach, close to hiatus/end of esophagus. Jagged edges present on bone, too, where it was pulled apart. Much nausea/~vomitting from him gagging. Under fluoro, I gave the guy thick barium-mix to visualize where it was and degree of blockage, etc (surgeon request) and the barium slug washed bone(s) on down to stomach. Doc said that was good enough to avoid a surgical procedure and sent the guy home with instructions to not make bets on bone-swallowing after holding the bigger part of pulled-apart wishbone (double-or-nothing challenge from a sore loser is what led to this). There weren’t any serious worries from surgeon about bowel probs that I could tell and this was not first time he had dealt with bones-in-belly. He said the risks of anesthesia and using instruments in alimentary tract were much higher than leaving things to ‘nature’.
Risk -v- benefit thing of removing things retrograde from a person’s belly, in other words (in many instances anyways, and there’s always exceptions, too). Reminds me of those idiots that will pick apart large items, like cars, and eat them piece by piece for whatever reason (like this guy). :rolleyes:
OK, I see from further context what the problem is. A toothpick is a pointy stick, which is going to have trouble negotiating tight U-turns inside soft, squishy tubes. A porcelain crown is basically a little nugget of gravel that will at worst scrape the sides a little on its way through.
Makes no difference - most of the water molecules on this planet will have been pissed out by some creature or other, at some point during the history of the planet. Come to think of it, most of the carbon, hydrogen and other elements in every bit of food we consume has probably been shat out by something in the past, maybe over and over lots of times.