the periodontal quest

I have virtually perfect teeth. I brush twice a day and floss every night. I had braces, and I've had my wisdom teeth out, but overall dental health seemed to be in the bag.

My gums had other plans.

Apparently my bone and gum tissue is thinner than average and predisposed to recession. My dentist at home had me coming in for frequent cleanings to combat the recession, but it came to the point that he finally told me to find a gum specialist, a periodontist.

There's no better place to find a medical professional than Boston. And for reasonably priced care, I was directed to Tufts Dental School. All the students there seem to be from foreign countries, and instead of having separate offices, they all have their dental chairs and equipment set up in little cubicles in a large room. At the beginning of August I met my dentist, Fatema. She is from Kuwait, but lived for six years in Dublin. And she shocked me with x-rays of my front teeth, which showed dramatic bone recession between my lower front teeth. She thinks it was likely my braces that pushed the teeth out of their sockets and accelerated the recession. Not cool. Apparently I also have unusual roots on my two front teeth--short and kind of heart shaped.

The decision was that I need to have surgery. The supervising dentist (who has a stutter, but knows teeth and gums) suggested I would be a good candidate for a treatment so new I might be able to get it for free. It involves mixing my blood platelets with bone powder and putting it where my own bone has receded.

Cool, huh?

Technically, I'm getting the treatment for free (though still paying for the materials used) because I'm participating in a study. The downside of that is every step of the process has to be documented.

Today I spent three hours in the dentist chair getting my teeth photographed and having impressions taken. It's quite an effective form of torture. The only way to properly photograph a tooth would be to take it out of the mouth, but since that's not an option, we settle for stretching the lips past what I though was their limit to keep them out of the shot. The worst part is that while my dentist was holding the camera and another dentist was jamming a mirror in my mouth, I was holding the implements that did the actual stretching. And taking the impressions was worse. They needed two sets of impressions, so I knew going in I would have trays of pink goo in my mouth at least four times. In the end it was quite a few more: four to get the top and four for the bottom. It was tough because the mold had to record the receded gums as well as the teeth. The last one almost gagged me, and even thinking of the Virgin Islands like the dentist from the cubicle next door suggested didn't help.

The theory is that all of this effort and discomfort will be worth it when my perfectly healthy teeth don't fall out of my mouth on my 30th birthday. The surgeries will be spread out over the next several months as we tackle my mouth in quadrants. The first one is in just a few weeks, so be ready for another installment in this saga of periodontal proportions.

-Kim