Living Life

I never thought I’d have to cure my teeth grinding. But it’s strange how things can happen when you really don’t want or expect them to - I’m sure you have had something similar happen to you before. This was one of those times when I knew in the back of my mind I should do something, but I didn’t. I mean, I was aware I was doing it, I just didn’t see it as a big issue, as something I had to be concerned about or do anything about. Now that was a mistake.

I was at my job one day, just a normal work day with no big problems or worries, when suddenly my tooth started hurting. Not a lot of pain, but enough to worry me and send me straight to the dentist. Luckily it was quite a minor thing (nothing to do with grinding) and the dentist managed to fix me up with some antibiotics. That was the good part.

The bad news? It seems I’d managed to do a lot of damage to one of my back teeth via grinding my teeth. In the dentists words it was a miracle I hadn’t been in agony, but it was a ‘time bomb’ and could strike at any time. Clearly I needed to do something.

So what choices did I have? I could get my tooth taken out (costing $500) or get a triple (yes triple) root canal (it would cost more than $2000). $2000 is a lot of money don’t you think? But I like my body parts (even my teeth), and didn’t want to have any removed. So I found the money and went for the root canal.

So, several weeks, dental visits and a plenty of money later, the work was all done. I left the dental surgery confident I had put my tooth grinding nightmare behind me. Except of course, I hadn’t. Within 2 days I had torn apart my newly rebuilt tooth, and it couldn’t be fixed. So in the end I had to get it extracted (painfully) anyway.

The thing is, I could have easily avoided the whole trauma. With some simple information and simple actions, I could cure bruxism before it caused all that trauma. If you are worrying about teeth grinding at all. I suggest you do something too.