My teeth are a little sore today. Actually just one - an emerging wisdom tooth on the lower left-hand side of my pie-hole. My dental surgeron told me a couple months ago that this tooth - and two more (which haven’t popped out yet) - must be removed. However, he added that I could put off the operation until the end of November at the least.
Problem is December is just around the corner and I don’t want to go under the pliers just quite yet. It’s not the thought of pain or having to take a week off work (yay!), rather my current state of student penury :(. So I’m hoping to put it off until the new year at least (when I can hopefully impose on my parents to upgrade my health insurance [crosses fingers]).
At the moment they rarely hurt (although I zealously brush and floss the little gap between my last molar and the emerging tooth), but I’m afraid if I wait too long the tooth will emerge and perhaps push aside my other teeth. Really, I have no idea what wisdom teeth do if allowed to grow, but I’ve got that the image of Lisa Simpson’s time-projected teeth pushing out through her top of her skull in my mind (Dental Plan! Lisa needs braces!).
Are there any formerly-wisdom-teeth-afflicted Dopers that can provide any insight? How long can wisdom teeth be ignored?
They don’t do anything except hurt. If they hurt you’ll want to take them out just for that reason. If they don’t hurt you can leave them ther indefinitely. The only reason I had mine taken out after many years is they were full of cavities.
I have been putting having mine extracted for 3 years. They don’t hurt but I think I will get them yanked this year. The major problems with wisdom teeth is that they are hard to reach with a tooth brush and are susceptible to cavities or if they come in , I believe the phrase is Impacted, sideways they may push your other teeth forward in our mouth and out of alignment.
I’m no dentist … but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Ask your dentist if they’re having an effect on the rest of your teeth. I was only 17 when mine started to come in. I put off getting them out because they weren’t hurting, but in the meantime they undid some of my many-thousands-of-$-worth of braces work. (Mine were so impacted that 2 or 3 of them were coming in horizontally.) The damage wasn’t really major, mind you, but enough that it annoys me fifteen years later.
I had four severely impacted wisdom teeth. This had no effect on me at all until a few years ago (at which time I was about 43), when I woke up one morning in excruciating pain. A course of anti-inflammatories provided temporary relief; meanwhile the dentist recommended that I see a dental surgeon to have them extracted.
OK, perhaps most people have better experiences than this, but the extraction left me in even worse pain than before for at least three weeks, and I found myself picking bits of shattered jawbone out of my mouth for some six months afterward (can I get an “EWWWWWWW”?). YMMV.
Anyway, from my personal experience if they ever start to hurt, you’re gonna need to have them removed at some point.
I’ve had my wisdom teeth for over a decade now. Never gave me a bit of trouble.
It differs a lot from person to person. I had 4 teeth removed previously, which opened up space on my jaw and let the wisdom teeth come in easily. I just have to be sure when brushing and flossing to get all the way back there.
I have three & they are just fine. One time I asked the dentist myself to take one out cause I was chewing on myself. The one opposite kept growing up but its okay.
I just went to the dentist last week (after an embarassingly long time) and I’ll have to have mine removed as well. Three of them are growing in straight and will come out easily. The fourth is coming in SIDEWAYS!! It’ll take some work. According to the dentist and his assistant, I should be up and chewing in a day or so.
I have all four of my wisdom teeth. They came in one at a time while I was a poor college student with no dental insurance. I now can understand why babies cry so much when teething…it hurts a lot. The worst pain occurs when the tooth is just breaking through the gums…after that it’s not quite as bad. As each tooth came in I would just learn to chew my food on the opposite side…Orajel and Advil were also close friends to me. Last year I went to the dentist for the first time in 7 years. I was convinced they would shriek in horror at the state of my teeth, but I was wrong. Turns out my wisdom teeth had come in straight so they had no impact on the teeth around them…they actually straightened my other teeth out a bit and fixed a gap between my two front teeth.
Bottom Line:I was in excrutiating pain off and on for 2 yrs or so. I have 4 extra teeth in hard to reach areas of my mouth…I just have to be extra vigilant when brushing. So far so good.
I’m lucky. All 4 of my wisdom teeth came in perfectly straight and with no real pain back in college. No cavities in any of them, either. It’s a really tight fit. though, as my jaws are fairly small, so my dentist was actually surprised I didn’t have any problems.
Mine started coming in at seventeen; I had incredible pressure in my ear, a round of doctors and even an emergency room visit failed to find out why I had such an earache.
Someone asked if I had my wisdom teeth still. My wha-? Two x-rays later…
The punchline is, after having the impacted tooth removed, I wound up with an ear infection.
I had all 4 of mine removed when I was age 40 or so because they were growing horizontally. They never bothered me, but it was recommended that they be removed. So I consented. I had no postsurgical pain. Probably because I had a paneless dentist. (He had no windows in his office.)
I had mine removed individually six months apart sitting in the dentist chair wide awake with a numb mouth. It was quite surreal seeing them approach my mouth with a tiny circular saw but it worked and I wasn’t out of action like I would have been had I been knocked out. I could even chew afterwards so long as I used the other side of the mouth.
Yes, my dad was really cheap and I as a poor high school then university student couldn’t pay for it myself. It may be an option to speak to your dentist about.
I had my wisdom teeth removed a year and a couple of months ago. They started giving me problems several months prior, first with an occasional ache which progressed to serious, constant headaches. I had an x-ray and was missing one, so I ended up with three wisdom teeth. The one on top was coming in fairly straight, but the bottom two were almost completely horizontal under my gums and were pressing against the roots of the teeth in front of them. Their roots were also very tangled with the rest of the nerves in my jaw.
I did not have health insurance, and so by the time I did manage to get insurance and have them removed they were quite bad. I had to be given and IV and totally knocked out, and during the surgery one of the teeth was chopped in half to remove it. They also hit some of the nerves in my jaw, because when the anesthesia wore off a day or two later, I never recovered feeling on the lower left portion of my face, lip and jaw. To this day it is numb and I have to look in a mirror after eating, because often I get food there and of course, don’t know about it.
There are good and bad sides to having them out, but in my case having no feeling in part of my face is better than the constant pain they were causing me to have.
The one tooth I have that is emerging is indeed ‘impacted’. My x-rays show that the other two are also coming out sideways. Plus my jaw is pretty small (I had 13 extractions as a child to compensate for an overcrowded mouth, followed up with two years of braces). I guess I’ll have to get them done pretty soon, penury or no.
Unless they cause pain, you can safely ignore them. However, there can be a problem with food getting trapped under the gum and causing seriously nasty inflammation and bleeding, which spreads fast. If that happens once, antibiotics will sort it out. If it happens again, you need to have the offending WT taken out. No need to be knocked out - just plain local anasthetic will do it OK.
Yes, that happened to me. Not fun at all. Woke up one morning with one side of my face puffed up like a melon, and made an immediate appointment to get rid of 'em.