This is my first post about getting my new teeth. I plan on making a few posts about my journey through getting dentures so that others can find this information and hopefully it’ll be a help to them. I want to do this because I’ve found so little information about the healing and recovery of getting a denture from the perspective of a young woman, like myself. I hope that if you’re looking for help that you can find some helpful information in this and future blog posts regarding these changes.
I suppose the best place to start would be the reasoning behind why I’ve come to get an upper denture (no, I didn’t get a lower one). Some people are blessed with perfect teeth and never get so much as one cavity in their lives; I, on the other hand, have been dealt shitty teeth. I’ve been fighting cavities since I can remember but things weren’t so bad until a few years ago. I went into DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis) in May of 2010, I blame that unfortunate event as the REAL beginning of the deterioration of my teeth. Up until getting my teeth pulled my mouth was a wasteland. Along with having cavities through my teeth I also had them lining all of my upper teeth along the gum line. It was SO painful. I could feel my body constantly fighting off tooth infections; I’d been to the ER more times than I can count just from the extreme pain that sometimes took over. Along with the pain I also had to deal with crazy blood sugars (I’m a type one diabetic, though I know people who keep up with my blog already know this) because infections make keeping sugars where they’re supposed to be nearly impossible.
I’d been hoping to get dentures for a long time but being afraid of surgery and the massive cost of getting all this work done held me back for a long time. People have asked me, “Why not get implants?” It is a great question, and in a perfect world I would have gotten them, but it’s not a perfect world and dental implants cost something like 2-4 thousand dollars PER tooth. I hope I don’t have to explain why that wasn’t an option for me, haha. So last October I, with help from my family, began to plan out fixing my dental problems. It was a long hard road finding a dentist (and oral surgeon) who was actually helpful and understanding of what I was going through. Luckily, I finally found the help I’d so badly needed. After fighting and conquering my depression, grieving my son, and dealing with my diabetes, getting my teeth fixed was, I felt, the last thing holding me back from becoming the person I’m supposed to be, and it’s finally done!
Yesterday morning, 2/26/13, I went in for surgery at 6:50 in the morning. I’d opted for IV sedation, as opposed to getting a ridiculous amount of novocaine shots, and I couldn’t be happier with my decision (I take enough shots as it is, lol). I can remember my oral surgeon telling me, after I’d gotten the IV put in, that any needles I saw from then on were just going into the IV… And that’s basically all I remember until they woke me up. I do seem to recall having an itch on my face that I tried to scratch and was told not to move, and then the itch coming back and I actually got my hand to my face and itched it. Now, I don’t know if that was a dream or not but I was certainly in no pain, so you need not worry about pain if you get put under for oral surgery. I got all of my upper teeth pulled and two others pulled on the lower right side of my face, I think it was a total of 14 or 15 teeth that I had extracted. When they woke me up the nurse moved me to a different room to let the anesthesia wear off and when my mother came in the room I was crying, she did not expect this. My mother asked me what was wrong and I told her, “I’m just so happy.” Because I am more stoked than I can even express that I’ve finally gotten this surgery out of the way, that I finally have my new teeth in.
Now, I am on day two of recovery. I’m not going to try to sugar coat this for you, I am in a fuck load of pain, though it is (mostly) being controlled by a nice mix of ibuprofen and Percocet. I am bleeding less than I was yesterday, thank goodness, though I make sure to keep paper towels (or a rag) under my mouth when I fall asleep to keep the blood off of my pillows and sheets. The right side of my face is super swollen, but I read that the swelling is the worst on the second or third day, so I’m at least halfway through the terrible swelling. Also, I’ve been icing my face frequently. The instructions told me 20 minutes on and 20 minutes off for the ice pack but, honestly, who can keep an ice pack on their face for 20 straight minutes? Not I!
I guess to end this blog post I want to tell you, again, how happy I am to finally have beautiful teeth again! I hope that this has been helpful to you if you’re exploring the option of dentures, and interesting for you if you just stumbled across this. Good luck to you all who are going down this same road I am on and please feel free to talk to me if you have any questions; I just might have an answer for you.
I’ll leave you with a few pictures of myself. They start with before my surgery, a picture of my new teeth, and finally a picture of my half-chipmunk swollen face.
before
after
chipmunk cheeks
and last, but not least, the adorable Get Well lamb that my best friend got me
xoxo
Alison
Watching: Alias
Just Blonde: Not Dumb 