Lily Pang Art

Lily Pang Art and Design, Gardening, Painting

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

My Dental Implant Ordeal

I am very sorry that I am absent from the blog for such a long time. I have being dealing with a failed dental bone implant in the last two month physically and emotionally.

The Lotus
I lost one of my teeth during my pregnancy when I ate something a bit hard and it cracked the teeth. I have being wearing removable denture since. As I heard more and more stories about dental implant and it makes me feel that it is a fairly safe procedure to go for it, I decided to try the dental implant last month.

I did the implant surgery called sinus lift to add bone graft between the sinus membrane and the jaw bone as the doctor told me that there is not enough bone for the implant. It was a really horrible surgery. The doctor drilled the teeth bone beside my nose and make a small opening to the sinus membrane to put some dried freeze bone called allograft under my sinus. My cheek was swollen and blood coming out of my nose after few days of the surgery. I felt so tired all day and couldn't work on computer for even more than 5 minutes. The wound healed finally, but the worst came after it. I developed sever sinusitis in the surgery side of the nose and my ear was blocked and pain and constantly had clear fluid from the nose. I knew infection is the worst enemy of the surgery, but I didn't expect even worse was the sinusitis. I have headache, nausea,  blocked nose, ear and extreme tired. My doctors thought it was infection and gave me so much antibiotics that are more than I have ever taken in my entire life. Finally, I believed that my body was rejecting the graft and was telling me to get the graft out of it no matter how much the cost.

The dental surgeon and ENT doctor wanted me to try oral steroid, anti-histamine medicine those medicine that I have never touched before to get things under control, but I really heard my body was telling me otherwise. I finally got the surgeon to do another surgery to clear the graft.

After almost a week after the second surgery, I am slowly getting my energy back and today I am able to write the experience.

Although I heard so many wonderful stories about implant, I dreaded to do it for a long time because normally I don't like to go to see dentist. After I saw so many people going through very rough cosmetic surgery including whole face and teeth, I told myself that I only have one teeth to repair, it should be easy. Finally I summon all my courage to go for it. But now I am so scared to do any rough dental work.

But I am so grateful to God that I am recovery and will be back to my usual self soon. I look at my denture and wonder why I hate it so much before. It looks perfect to me now and will wear it for the rest of my life. 

I have never feel so strongly the importance to have good health. This is the one good thing coming out of the ordeal. I think it may save me a lot of health problem in future.