Now with added titanium!

[randomness]

Dentist: "Congratulations, you now have an implant."

Dentist: "I need to warn you about what's coming next. It's going to feel like I'm thumping your skull with a hammer."
Me: "Well, because you are."
Dentist "Um, pretty much, yeah."

It's a wacky experience having a mallet (which looks something like a ball-peen hammer with nylon faces) and a ratchet wrench used on your skull in fairly rapid succession. Not surprisingly, I'm a little woozy.

Comments

[donnad.livejournal.com]

Oh gee... thanks for the warning, I'm looking at a mouthful of implants sometime in the next three months. But mine will be done under complete sedation since the work will be so extensive.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Well, they don't always use a mallet. As explained to me, sometimes, in order to preserve bone, they will hammer in a spike to create the space for the implant, rather than drill, because when they drill, they lose the bone which they drill away.

So if yours are not in a place where bone needs to be preserved, they may not do this. In my case it saved me from bone grafts.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

I will need as much bone preserved as possible. I may actually need a bone graft afterall. They still aren't really sure, the panorex wasn't conclusive and I'll need a CT to determine if I have enough bone mass. If I need the graft, it'll be a year before mine are done, it would take 8 months to heal enough to mantain the implants.

[krlisue.livejournal.com]

Yeah, recovery from the bone graft sucks. Only time in my life I actually used more than one or 2 of the happy pills they gave me.