This morning I woke at dawn, raring to go to my second appointment with the dentist. The anesthesiologist said it was okay to have a smoothie three hours before I went so I slurped that down along with a cup of tea with honey. Since I woke so early, I took a walk on the Pacific Coast beach, my eyes on all of the high, haphazardly built haciendas the whole time.
I arrived on time to Dr. Lagos’s office. The anesthesiologist guy hooked me up again. I looked at the Vitamin C drip bag and briefly wondered if it was bpa-free (doubt it). Like the day before, I drifted out and back in to somewhat notice what Dr. Lagos was doing. He was methodically tending to 7 or 8 fillings – removing the old, unknown substances and refilling them with biocompatible resins. I must have been asleep for some of it because I didn’t even notice when he took off my bridge and placed new temporary crowns on my lower left back tooth, #19, and the tooth nearer the front, #21. Now for the first time ever, my gum where #20 should have grown but never did, is open and free. I keep putting my tongue there to say hello.
Tomorrow the fun really begins, however (and, thankfully, ends). Tomorrow is my last day of dental work (Thursday will just be a check up day to make sure all is well), and it’s the day when he extracts three infected teeth and replaces them with exciting partials. One on the upper right, one on the upper left, one on the lower left (where #20 never grew). After the appointment today he told me that tomorrow I would go ‘deeper’ under the anesthesia for the extractions. I happen to be fine with this (no I did not used to do drugs in my younger days. Okay yes I did).
Returning to the B&B and thoroughly checking my mouth out in the mirror, I see that once again he did a tremendous job. The teeth, though temporary fillings, look so real that I wouldn’t know they weren’t. I have no bruising or pain, just a little sensation when I try to open my mouth really big, which I don’t try to do.
The only downside so far - and actually it’s probably one of those blessings in disguise - is that he tried filing down my tooth #3, one of the crowns that will be pulled tomorrow, to see if my bite would improve if it weren’t jutting down so. He discovered that it did not make a difference to my bite. He said he thought it would, but that it now appears to him that I have had some sort of jaw shift that has caused that. He didn’t know. He is actually the fourth dentist in a year that has told me they don’t know the cause of this misalignment. It's as though my lower jaw has moved an inch over to the right. I remember that it happened seemingly overnight last year. One day my bite was not the greatest, the next day my left teeth didn’t touch at all. It happened during a chelation round with alpha lipoic acid (one of the reasons I stopped chelation rounds last summer).
So, my off bite can’t be fixed by Dr. Lagos, but everything else either has or will be. For the bite, I will look to structurally aligning my mal-aligned body (scoliosis, a fused spine, a desk job, and too little movement play roles here). Luckily, I know about Egoscue Therapy and how fabulous it it. Which is why I started a blog about it two years ago. Egoscue is one of the rare things in life where after you do it, you immediately feel better. There’s no “Is it working? I can’t tell.” And it only takes 20 minutes a day – something I’ve not been able to swing for many months.
And I do think my problem is structural, not dental, since it’s pretty unlikely to have all your teeth shift overnight.
So, to sum up Day 2, I am glad I'm getting this work done..
Tomorrow more porcelain/aluminum will come out (not to mention some steady sources of pathogenic bacteria from the infected teeth). And anesthesia will again be quite helpful.