temporary

I am going to get two crowns.

Not like this.

Like this.

And oh, if only it was as easy and pretty as it looks in the picture. Well, maybe not with the gargantuan sanitized tooth decay shown in the adjacent tooth.

When you get to a certain age, you find out what's wrong with you. With me, it's a few things, but one of them is cracking up molars. Yes, I'm so funny I crack up my own teeth. HA HA! No, really, my 6 and 12 year old molars have been around for a long time. They all got amalgam (silver coloured) fillings when I was a teenager. Apparently amalgam fillings put pressure on the remaining tooth material which, along with the general pressure of chewing for 20-35 years, causes them to get tiny fracture lines. Eventually a fracture develops into a crack, then there's pain, then perhaps a replacement filling, but sometimes a crown.

On Wednesday I sat in the dentist's chair for 2 and a half hours while my lovely dentist and his kind and skilled assistant worked on two of my teeth, side by side (my teeth that is - the dentist and assistant sat across from one another, with me in the middle, with my mouth open). The dentist and his assistant removed my old fillings and put in new composite (white) fillings. Then they proceeded to grind away most of my two molars leaving what felt like stumps, but which had to be mostly fillings, jutting up from my tooth roots. For a little while I got to rest, so of course I poked around with my tongue and felt two peg teeth, waiting for lovely crowns to make them whole again. I should say that the poking was done with a half-frozen tongue, so my perception was a bit wacky. To clarify, only my tongue and face were frozen. My brain was a-ok. My brain was saying, "please let this be over!" and also, "this is very interesting and cool - how often do you get to have peg teeth? and to poke them with your tongue?" Fortunately, not often. But still, it was interesting.

At the end of the procedure, the skilled assistant produced two "temporary" teeth made out of glue and sawdust or maybe silly putty and hairspray. She glomped them onto my peg teeth and I had to bite repeatedly on blue paper to make sure they weren't too high. Nobody like high teeth.

In two weeks, I will return to the dentist's office. At that time my lovely dentist and his skilled assistant will glue on two lovely crowns made out of diamonds and fairy dust and titanium and rainbows. They will match my other teeth perfectly only they will not be cracking up. I can tell my funniest jokes and slip on banana peels and other such hilarious hijinks, but the new crowns will not crack up.

In the meantime, there are rules: no sticky food, no super-hard crunchy food, no playing fetch with rebar rods, okay to floss in, but not back out (instead draw the floss out sideways from between the teeth). For those of you who know about my (slight) obsession with dental hygiene, you will know how difficult this is for me. Two weeks without a good thorough up and down floss back there is difficult for me. But I will survive. After all, the queen has survived. I can too.

And when it's all finished, nobody will know the difference, except for my dentist and his skilled assistant and my curious tongue.

question: do you wear a crown?

mompoet - temporary