Dental Work

I ask the indulgence of the readers regarding this entry on my dental problems, but after all this is a blog and I am trying to document this adventure as comprehensively as I can.

I visited Dr. De Castillo this morning and the session was short and sweet, as they say.  He discussed the two options: root canal and crown vs tooth extraction and bridge.  I tried to steer him to the crown option, telling him that saving a bit of money wasn't as important as picking the best solution.  In the end he convinced me that tooth extraction will give me a better result because with a crown there would be the problem of anchoring the plate to that new crown, resulting in slippage and movement of the plate.  He told me that it would be more profitable for him to give me the root canal and crown, but that would not be in my best interest.

So on Monday morning I'll visit for an impression of my upper teeth and the removal of my plate.  He expressed concern that I would be without the plate for a day and I told him that it's no problem because these days I'm neither working nor chasing women.  Using the impression the dental technician will be able to replace the existing tooth on the plate and add a second tooth to replace the molar to be extracted.

On Tuesday afternoon I will visit again for the extraction and fitting of the "new" plate.  Pretty fast work, I think.

The all up cost will be 4950 pesos, or about $400 Aussie dollars.

I asked him about my teeth getting darker and darker.   He attributes it to aging.  Yea, maybe there is an element of aging in it, but I have a twin brother with much whiter teeth.  I've been drinking a LOT of black tea lately, so just in case that's the problem I have switched to green tea hoping that it won't turn my teeth green.

I'm thinking of painting the fronts of my teeth with two coats of that super durable white Imron paint that I've been using on the boat.  (Just kidding.)

One bit of good news is that the pain in my lower jaw was not due to a broken filling, but rather to material getting jammed in my gum line, which was fixed by the cleaning effort of two days ago.  This explains why it suddenly hurt big time during bus trip of Mexico but then steadily calmed down over time.  He has seen no other dental problem, but I'll ask him to have a close check again.