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My upper right wisdom tooth is 2/3 gone

A

almondjoys

Junior member
Joined
Jun 18, 2006
Messages
6
I am having my upper right wisdom tooth removed, Wednesday.  I am scared to death. I am over 40 and have read teeth removal over age 40 is hard on the patient. I am  afraid of the risks....nerve damage, sinus damage, and dry socket.

The tooth's crown is broken down to the gumline in several places. I am wondering how this tooth will be removed. Will the tooth be drilled out of the bone? I am taking the dentist's sedation pill bfore the procedure. I am wondering what level of  consciousness I will have.

Thanks for your help and information.
 
I keep saying this on here. Taking teeth out with no crown (the bit above the gum) is much easier usually than with the crown intact. Dentists do NOT "drill the teeth out of the bone" sometimes a little bit of bone needs to be removed, usually with a drill to make extraction easier, but that's pretty rare on upper teeth.

Removal of teeth on over 40's is even easier, you've had time for some gum disease to work on the tooth and make it looser.

Nerve damage is not an issue on an upper wizzie, sinus damage would require a serious amount of bad luck on your behalf and pretty clumsy work on the dentists for it to be a problem and a dry socket is pretty rare. More rare in upper teeth than lower.

What sedation pill are you taking, they all have different effects on your consciousness level.
 
Thanks for the information. :)

So, the tooth is actually easier to remove when the crown is partially missing? I don't have gum disease or loose teeth but maybe just being 40 something means the teeth are not as tightly attached in the bone as a younger person's?
Well, hopefully, the dentist will have the tooth out in a few minutes.
Since you mentioned nerve damage and sinus damage as likely not to happen, I won't worry then. Thanks for the reassurance.
I am not sure what type of pill I am taking for sedation. I was told not to drink or eat for 12 hours prior to the surgery. I was told that it might take 6-8 hours to completely wear off and I would be sleepy all day.

Thanks very much. :)
 
This past Wednesday I just had 13 teeth removed and I'm 48. I had three that were broken off like you describe; one was an anterior bicuspid and two were molars. I was actually more worried about how much effort it would take to extract the (what I thought of as "intact") molars than to extract the broken ones or the looser ones.

I have stitches in three places; the anterior region, because they did an aveloplasty/ectomy or whatever it is they call it, which is a typical procedure; and in an upper molar area and in both sides of the lower molar area. I guess she had to do some cutting.

I have been keeping on top of any bad pain by taking pain medication every six to eight hours as prescribed. As it turns out, I only had to take one of the opiods; the rest of the time I've been doing fine on Ibuprofen 800. In fact, a few times I just took two my OTC Ibuprofen 200s and have done just fine with that.

This is day four post-op and almost all of the swelling has gone from out of my face. I had an immediate denture placed and that helped keep the swelling to a minimum. I go tomorrow morning to have them do a slight adjustment, because the occlusion is off just a bit, but that's not unusual when doing an immediate denture.

I didn't have oral sedation; I had IV sedation. The procedure, I was told, was to take approximiately an hour 15, hour 30, and, to me, it seemed like the whole thing was over with in five, maybe 10 minutes total.

I wasn't aware of anything except toward the end when I was "waking up." (In quotes because you're not actually asleep, but it seems as though you are, because you just aren't aware, really, of anything that's going on while it's going on. The Valium in the IV "cocktail" really does what it's supposed to do! It's amazing. It has an amnesic affect and I'm not sure how, but seems to have this effect WHILE the procedure is going on. I don't remember anything about it except, as I said, toward the end I remember seeing her hand in front of my face with the thread as she was taking a couple of stitches and I was thinking, "Wow; she's done the aveloplasty already?" Next thing I knew I was coming around again.

I wasn't dizzy at all, wasn't nauseous, just groggy, and I had to have a bit of assistance getting from the dental chair into a wheelchair and then into my son-in-law's car.

As far as nerve damage or any of that, when I read that on the release form, I thought, OMG! There's a risk of "this, this and this and this" happening?" But, as with anything else, there are always associated risks and a part of the waiver has to do with their insurance and CYing their A, too, if ya know what I mean. ;-)

Anyhoo, as I said, I had 13 removed, I'm even older than you are and I'm doing perfectly fine. I hardly even had any bleeding at all! When I got home I threw away the gauze they had used right after the surgery, and haven't had to use any sense. And barely any spitting either.

So, I'm sure you'll do just fine! About the only thing I can suggest is, if you have pain, take your meds at the first sign of the pain; don't wait to start hurting very badly, because it's easier to stay ahead of the pain than it is to try to get rid of it once it's there. But you should be just fine in two, three days, tops, I would bet.

:-D
 
This is the second time here I've spelled "since" "sense." That's bad, because I'm an editor. Grrr. ;-)
 
Thanks for the encouragement. I am glad you are feeling okay after such extensive dental work. :)
 
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