My day started with a trip to the dentist … scheduled … where he replaced a bridge in the top front of my mouth and put a crown on another tooth. Then this afternoon at 4 p.m. I was back (again, a scheduled visit) for him to fit a partial plate to fill a gap until I can get an implant put in place. I’m not done with all this dentist stuff, although today was a significant milestone. Next Thursday is the Big Day where he attempts once again to get my lower right jaw numb instead of my tongue.

Starting today I’ve moved my twittering to a new blog, links on the sidebar on the right, dedicated to my tweets. These tweets are quick looks at a moment in time as to what was happening, but they seemed to be taking over my regular blog! We’ll see how that works. The latest tweets will still be down on the right sidebar.

All the activity with the dentist, besides the genetic inheritance from my dad, date back to when I was in the 2nd grade in Soda Springs, Idaho. I got into a fight with an older kid across the street which degenerated into us throwing rocks at each other. He threw one that hit me right in the mouth, breaking off the top front left incisor tooth and splitting my top lip open. It was a pretty bloody and very painful experience. The tooth was not repairable. The doctor sewed up my lip which required two other operations over my teenage years to get it shaped reasonably correctly. The dentist pulled the root from the broken tooth and I wore a partial plate (which was very useful for grossing out the girls when I played with it in my mouth) until I was in the Air Force.

While we were stationed at Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, Texas, the Air Force dentists put in a bridge that allowed me to get rid of the partial plate. A few years later the k9 tooth on the upper left finally fell out (it was a baby tooth … the permanent tooth had impacted in the roof of my mouth and the dental surgeon had to remove that when I was 16), requiring a new bridge to fill that gap. In dental terms, teeth 9 and 11 were missing. The Air Force bridge went from 8 to 10 and the new bridge anchored on 12 and rested on 10.

Eventually that entire system began causing a lot of problems, so in 2000 while we were living in Colorado Springs I cashed in some stock options and had all my teeth capped and new bridges put in place. That dentist engineered a bridge that anchored on 8, 10, and 12 filling in the gaps for teeth 9 and 10.

By the time we moved to Pocatello, that bridge was loose. The dentist here checked it every time I had my teeth cleaned until this fall when he told me they needed to figure a better system and also determine why the bridge was loose. They popped off the bridge (much more difficult and painful that that sounded) and found that tooth #8 had a big cavity. Further, because the bridge kind of went around a corner, the tops of 10 and 12 were wearing because there was too much stress on the bridge. At the same time they found that #13 also had a big cavity under the crown. So, root canals were done on #8 and #13. A new bridge that would only go from 8 to 10 was put in place today along with a new crown for #12. That left a gap for #11 which the partial plate the dentist put in this afternoon fills temporarily until I get an implant done (very expensive).

Still to be done is to put a new crown on #13 and fill a cavity on #30 on the bottom right (the one that he couldn’t get numb last week). Then I need to do the implant which takes about six months to heal after putting the titanium screw in place (the healing time also includes a calcification process where new bone material deposits on the rough surface of the titanium). After that a crown is put on the implant and I should be done for a while. I’m right ready to be finished with the dentist!