I haven’t blogged much in the last few months because I have been entirely too busy. A new job, a reorganization at work, construction on the addition at home, and a few other things all going on at once — a sort of perfect storm of individual things that can cause tremendous disruption in life all happening at once.
One of the many “little” things that has filled in the spaces between the bigger ones is that I finally got the dental implant that I’ve needed since I cracked a back molar through the root and it had to be extracted a few years ago. I put the implant off too long because I was scared of the procedure (and the cost), which meant I have a lot of other dental work necessary to save the tooth opposing the one I lost, but that’s a story for another day.
Two months ago, the dental implant specialist placed a titanium screw in my jaw. The procedure only took like 90 minutes and wasn’t that bad. I didn’t feel a thing during the surgery, but my jaw was sore from being open that wide for that long as they drilled the hole in my jaw bone and worked to get the implant placed in exactly the proper position before the dental surgeon literally screwed the Titanium implant into place. I’m not kidding. If you want to know more about how dental implants work, go here. Wikipedia has a surprisingly good, detailed explanation of how dental implants work.
All the details are good, but experience is a different thing entirely. My recovery from the implant has been more difficult than I expected, and more emotionally weird.
First off, it took days for the swelling to go down even though I followed every bit of advice and put an ice pack on my jaw every 20 minutes the first day, used the medications and special mouthwash, and so on. But since I had experienced serious trauma in the form of a drill making a hole in the jaw bone, I had to allow for recovery time.
The bigger surprise was that for the first week or two, I felt twinges of pain from the area of the implant if I talked too much, laughed to loud, or yawned too wide. This may all be because the implant is at the very back of my lower jawbone, but it was a challenge for me since I talk a lot and tend to laugh a lot, too. Every time it twinged, I worried, because I do a lot of that, too.
Luckily, the twinges subsided with time.
Still, I worried for weeks that the darn thing might not “take.” I’d read enough about implants to know that some fail, sometimes for reasons no one can explain. I love drinking from straws, but have done so only once or twice since I got the implant because I don’t want to risk messing things up (even though I think they only encourage you to not drink from a straw for the first 3 to 5 days).
So I’ve worried. More than I should, but that’s how I am.
However, I have to say that this week — really in the last couple days — I’ve finally begun to feel like the implant is “normal” and staying in place. I think this is going to work! I looked at the calendar and realized that my two month mark with the implant was Tuesday. Maybe it just takes that long to adjust to this new thing in my mouth.
No worries!
