I learned about various levels of dental anesthesia during a procedure last fall - my excellent dentist was prepping a tooth for a crown (this is the only crown I have on a tooth that’s not been root canaled). He did the first shot. That didn’t do anything at all. So he did the second and was talking about how dentists have gotten lazy since his father’s day (my dentist is 40, so my age): the anesthetics have gotten better, so they don’t have to locate quite as precisely, but for that second shot he was doing something differently (some kind of hole or something? I don’t remember what).
That didn’t numb me as much as he wanted, so there was another shot. And when that didn’t get me there he did what I think was called an intraligamental block. I felt nothing after that (and for about 5-6 hours afterward) in that quadrant of my mouth. But I was so incredibly sore once it wore off - not from the procedure, but from the block.
The point of this being that it absolutely fascinated me with dental anesthesia. I don’t want to be a dentist, but I didn’t realize until then that it’s such a precise matter.
I had all of mine extracted at one setting, I may have had 4 or 5 allready missing. It was no big deal. Posts were installed and dentures fitted all in one visit.
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your gawd like a soldier.” – Rudyard Kipling
And I always thought that sounded bad. Guess Kipling never had any dealings with Royal army dentists.
A soldier, it was his own army that did it, possibly as a result of him contracting malaria out there, or maybe just gum disease. That was back in about 1914.
Back in the mid-sixties my mum had all her teeth taken out because she had gingivitus. I think NHS dentists at the time were better paid for extracting teeth rather than treating them, so that might have been a contributory factor.
I was two at the time and my elder sister was four. I still remember how we laughed after getting to read a book about a girl named ‘Amelia Anne Spiggins’ to us with her new false teeth.
My father had all his pulled for dentures when he was in the army, and I think it was in one session. My friend’s husband had all his pulled (he had already lost a couple) for dentures a couple of years ago. He had it done all at once and came home with temporary dentures.
I have had my wisdom teeth pulled and hope to hang on to all my others as long as I can.
I can’t speak for Charlie Wayne’s location, but yeah, we definitely say “freeze” here in Canada. I didn’t realize till now that everyone didn’t use that term.
ETA: A guy I went to high school with died in the chair during a wisdom teeth extraction. Something about allergy to the anesthetic or something. Weird at the time.
I had one tooth that had to be yanked when I was a kid. I was about 8 or 9 and one of my baby teeth hadn’t fallen out yet, so the adult tooth was growing out the side of my gum.
This was back in the 80s and all they gave me was the needle shot. I remember feeling the most pain I ever felt in my life and it’s given me my lifelong fear of dentists to this day.
So these days I make sure to take extremely good care of my teeth, just so I rarely have to see the dentist.
Back in Texas, I has a prof whose wife was a doctor. She claimed there was an epidemic of cleaning women dying in dentists’ chairs. Seems they’d be in the office cleaning at night, decide to give themselves a little nitrous oxide fix or whatever the chemical was, then die from an overdose, only to be found in the morning.
Me, too! Although, mine had a bonus - I somehow had an extra tooth that was just kind of chilling in the wings, so they took that one out during that surgery.
I was elementary school aged, and I had no idea that I’d been having excruciating headaches until they were gone. My mom was freaked that I had an infection or something, because for the next couple days, I was telling her that my head felt so light and bouncy and I was in such a chipper mood.
If she was in pain, she might have wanted to get it done. Or, it might have been a condition of using general anesthesia. Either the dentist didn’t want to put her through successive sessions of GA, or she couldn’t afford it.
I have lots of fillings, but that gawd, all my actual teeth. My mother is 74, and has all her teeth, although she had one root canal, and has a crown on that tooth. My brother is 42, and has no fillings. I hate him. But, he didn’t need braces like I did. I got a lot of my fillings right after I got my braces off, and a few of them have had to be replaced after 30 years.
In the 1970’s my mom spent nearly 10 years having her gingivitius treated in an attempt to save her teeth. It didn’t work. In retrospect, she might have been better off having them pulled much sooner, so you mom’s treatment may have been the best option in the long run.
IIRC when that movie came out the ADA wanted us to protest to the movie studio or some such thing saying that that isn’t how dentists really are. Of course not no movies are about how anything is, they are entertainment and a business. Anyway I liked the movie. Saw every bloody/slasher movie I could when I was young. I thought the actual dental scenes were well done. Even The Dentist 2 was good.
