I’m not sure I’ve ever really had good teeth. As a child/ teenager I had extra teeth so had to have a few out to make some space and then I also had to have braces while I was in secondary school to help the vampire fangs (that’s what they looked like) and to straighten everything out. I was supposed to wear a retainer after this but I was terrible and forgot most of the time.
In my very early 20s I moved to Canada for a year on a working holiday visa. It didn’t take me long to realise that they didn’t have anything like squash/ cordial that we have over here and that was pretty much all I drank at the time. It didn’t take long for me to start drinking fizzy drinks all of the time because they were easy, available and sort of cheap. I also didn’t really like plain water then so that wasn’t really an option either. When you drink something like that for a year straight without much of anything else it’s easy to get addicted and that’s exactly what happened to me.
Even before I moved to Canada I remember a dentist saying all of my teeth would probably fall out before I was 30 but I was 19 or 20 at the time and I just laughed it off. I didn’t really think that was possible, especially at that point I wasn’t drinking lots of sugary drinks every day. Although that dentist was wrong about my teeth all falling out, he wasn’t wrong about them not being very good. I guess I should have listened here and looked after my teeth maybe even better than normal, rather than do something to make them worse.
Fast forward a few (and then some) years and my teeth are absolutely terrible. I think it was in 2019 that I finally gave up drinking Coca Cola after a filling fell out one of my front teeth and I cried for days about it. Luckily, I had just gotten into a new dentist after losing my own due to the staff leaving. I can’t even say how thankful I am to have a dentist now as getting one in Norfolk is close to impossible unless you want to go private.
Luckily my dentist is seeing patients again and I was able to get an emergency appointment after I broke a tooth a couple of months ago and we came up with a treatment plan for other things I needed doing. What we didn’t see happening was a really bad infection and my needing another emergency appointment for antibiotics. I’m not sure I’d ever felt dental pain like that before. At this point, it was decided that I needed 3 back teeth out, a root canal and a couple of fillings. I kind of knew that this was coming but it didn’t prepare me for just how much work it was.
Having 3 teeth out was intense and it was probably the worst thing I’ve ever had done at the dentist. One of the teeth I’d been told needed a root canal a couple of years ago and I refused and just had it filled instead because I was scared. Let me tell you, a root canal is nothing compared to having all of those teeth out and now I really regret the choice I made. I was so sad after having those teeth out and all I could feel was this huge hole where they should have been as they were all in a row.
I ended up having to have 3 appointments over the space of 7 days to get all of the work done. 3 teeth had been taken out and the root canal, while successful, isn’t something that is going to last and it cannot be crowned as we hoped. I took the plunge and asked my dentist about dentures, something that I will be able to have a few months down the line. We have to wait for my extraction wounds to heal properly and for my gums to be back to normal again.
I’m going to end up with a set of partial dentures at age 35. I never thought this would happen, even though I knew I did a lot of things that have ruined my teeth. It’s my own fault, I know that. The dentures will definitely end up covering the 3 teeth that were removed and I think I’ll end up having the root canal tooth out as well. The dentist said it’s better to have a denture that goes across the roof of my mouth and has some teeth on both sides and this way, we can replace a tooth that won’t last anyway.
I’m obviously not happy that I’ve ended up needing dentures at only 35. No one wants that. But, I have one side of my mouth where there are barely any teeth at the top and that is going to make eating difficult. I’m hoping that dentures are a temporary measure though. It might take me quite a few years but I’ve decided to save up the massive amount for an arch of dental implants. This will mean that the whole top row of teeth will be replaced with implants. I’m only young and I don’t want to have to worry so much about eating out etc. Dental implants aren’t a definite option either though because you have to make sure your mouth is right for the process. I guess I just have to keep my fingers crossed for that.
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