A few weeks after Gary had his wisdom teeth pulled, he complained they were growing back. I was skeptical until he pulled his jaw back to show me the sweet little row of eeedie-biddie tooth nubs along his gum line.
“It does look like your teeth are growing back.”
“Stupid teeth! The dentist NEVER told me that could happen!”
I was already on Google. I didn’t even finish typing “grow” before I found that “wisdom teeth growing back” is a popular search.
An aside: I do love that finish-your-sentence feature Google has now.
Evidently, the teeth only look and feel like they’re growing back. Instead, the fragments of tooth and jawbone left over from a rough extraction creep up through the gums and sprout like tiny barbed tongue-snagging hooks.
In the future I will know to Google “bone spicule” instead.
Gary is growing a shark mouth, poor baby.
He went back to the dentist today and had her pull them out. Horrendous pain. And a new one is already fighting its way toward his tongue.
Can you imagine? That did not happen to me when I had my wisdom teeth taken out.
10 responses to “Dental Horror”
Yeah, it’s official now. I’m never having my wisdom teeth removed. Screw that!
I have a broken wisdom tooth that I do not allow the dentist to touch. If it gets infected, fine, he can touch it. Otherwise, I’m living just fine with a broken tooth that isn’t infected and doesn’t hurt. So there.
Shh … don’t tell Gary, but for YEARS after I had my wisdom teeth pulled, little shards kept surfacing, like rocks popping up in a garden. It wasn’t so much painful as it was annoying. Eventually it stopped.
And I couldn’t help but wonder why the dentist charged me all that money, seeing as how he evidently left half the damn teeth in there anyway.
Amy in StL – I hate to tell you, the complications get worse as you get older.
Tami – Well, just pray it doesn’t migrate to your sinuses. There are many images of that on google.
RockyCat – Oh, God. Years? This can not be.
How the hell would my half tooth migrate to my sinuses? Aren’t teeth attached to the jaw, somehow? I now realize that I know next to nothing about teeth.
You meant the infection, didn’t you.
Tami! No! Tooth in sinus! Read #22:http://www.teethremoval.com/complications.html… or else do not. It is 4 am now and I just went back and read that whole page. Yikes. It’s a compilation of anything that has EVER gone wrong in a wisdom tooth extraction, compiled by someone who has something go wrong during a wisdom tooth extraction.
I am SO not reading that. Nope. Thanks for the research, though.
At 4am I was asleep. I’m really happy about that.
Tami – Good. Really terrifying.
As a dentist I can say that once wisdom teeth are removed they cannot grow back. If there is something that looks and/or feels like it could be a tooth where your wisdom tooth was extracted the most likely explanation is that a piece of root has been missed during the wisdom teeth removal procedure. Consult your dentist and he will do the requires further treatment.