A fully-packed day of wall-to-wall consults I had to cancel.
I’d been living with what I thought was a cavity in my molar for months. It made me chew on my left side, but occasionally a bit of stray food would get lodged in there and cause an explosion of pain inside my skull. But I have a deft tongue, good for dislodging food particles from hard-to-reach recesses in my mouth, and so the pain doesn’t last more than a couple of seconds.
Yesterday, however, something went in and the pain stayed with me for the next few hours. Definitely time to stop putting off the inevitable.
Today, I squeezed in an appointment with my dentist and expected the worst. Turns out there was no decay, but my tooth had cracked. The damage was bad enough to cause a little chunk of tooth to come loose, but not so bad as to leave the rest irreparable.
I had the sliver of tooth removed along with an existing filling which had been put in place years ago — a metallic blight against my natural enamel. Sounds painful, but I didn’t realise that was happening until it was over. The new cavity got a new filling, this time in a more natural colour. Yay!
Dentist suspects the crack might have been caused by me grinding my teeth in my sleep. There are wear marks and my canines are flattened. Next visit, we review the new filling, and barring further complications, reinforce it with a composite. Then maybe we’ll discuss the need for a night guard to deal with my night grinding.
Update 19 Jan 2018:
The repair has failed. Was crunching a McSpicy when the repaired molar split in half! Unsalvageable, it had to be extracted. Now living with a gap in the back. Dentist says that in time, my existing wisdom tooth will fill in the hole as it is growing in that direction, anyway. Haven't had an extraction since my early teens. Turns out the process was more frightening than painful. Maybe I have a good dentist?
