My jaw is pretty sore now, both the muscles from holding it open for 20 minutes and having my lower jaw stressed hard when the tooth was pulled, and also the gum/jaw area where the tooth was removed now actively hurts (pulsing pain).
So, here’s a few pictures of the tooth I had extracted. Feel free to show these to your kids, or your nieces and nephews as a reminder of why they should,
- brush their teeth more than they do
- take the advice of their dentist when he says ‘you should consider having your wisdom teeth out’
This tooth was impacted by one of my wisdom teeth growing into it at an angle, and basically got a cavity and decayed at the point of impact, until the hole you see was caused when that part of the tooth fell away a few weeks ago. I was lucky, it didn’t hurt.
If you’re reading this on an RSS feed reader, sorry, you’re going to see the pictures. If you’re reading it on the site’s front page, you can click the link to see the pictures. If you’re reading the full article already, then you can’t avoid the pictures any longer.
This is a shot of the tooth, with the decayed part not visible (it’s at the back). If you were looking at my head yesterday, and I opened my mouth, this is the direction you would have been looking at the tooth. i.e. the flat surface you can see was pointing straight out of my mouth. The decay was at the back of the tooth.
Side shot of the tooth, you can see an old filling in the top, and the missing back of the top of the tooth is more visible.
This is the shot of the back of the tooth. Yep. I know. I’m not sure if the dark area was like that due to the decay, or if that’s the result of most of the tooth being missing for 4 weeks while I got it sorted out. There’s a big hole in that section of the tooth which you can’t really see, which was caused by the dentist sticking a metal spike in it, in order to free the tooth up for removal.
This is the last side shot of the tooth which shows you the overhang from the top and where the piece sheered off while I was eating toast.
And finally, a couple of shots for scale.
