Spring

Cycled to work again on Friday -- and then a high-speed blitz into town for a short notice appointment early afternoon. So, the tooth with a cracked filling that had been playing me up for the last few weeks is now patched until the proper fix in May.

And next week is looking plausible for more cycling.

Mowed the lawn, what there is that isn't moss, and did some spring pruning, enough to fill up the green bin, before settling. And potted up some chilli seedlings and put them into a heated propagator in the greenhouse.

“Oh no, not again…”

Early anniversary dinner at the Willow Tree in Bourn -- a lovely meal, despite the couple of glitches (one of the dishes running out and confusion that engendered), and good conversation, at one point turning to an anecdote about an old woman whose eyes and teeth were the only bits not being ravaged by time. So of course I remarked that I was having pretty much the opposite, but thankfully the teeth seemed to have all been repaired now, and yes, I would have the ice-cream selection for dessert.

And indeed the teeth were not sensitive to cold. Just that a chunk fell off one of them.

Later

Monday I had a temporary crown fitted with permanent cement. Tuesday I got a slot to get an impression taken, so the mildly uncomfortable temp had to be drilled off. And after some inspection, the space was deemed to be very tight, so it's going to be a case of more bling for the grin in a couple of weeks' time. At least the new temporary is so far entirely happy rather than twinging when it gently contacted the tooth below.

A cautious hope

I now have two new crowns fitted -- a gold one holding together the cracked tooth where the gum has been healing for the past 18 months; and a porcelain one that could be fitted onto the remaining bits of the decapitated tooth, even if it is set a bit low.

The former took a lot of wedging to get into place for the test fit, the neighbouring teeth having closed in on the gaps that had been widened to allow a crown, and a lot of work to prise free again so all the glue could be applied. I can feel it still as being tight against the other teeth, but hopefully that feeling of teeth in bandage should fade in a few days as the teeth jostle about.

The other went in easy, and we hope that the lashings of glue will hold -- otherwise it's a root canal on a live tooth, and fitting a post that will be needed. *ugh*

AARRGHH!!!

The temporary crown in the lower right -- and some of the plastic stump -- just came off!The whole built up stump just came off -- carrying the temporary crown with it! Not only is this an inconvenience, it also means that means the mould taken last week is useless.

Progress

Finally, and at last, I had the moulds made to put two crowns on -- and amazingly, when the set gunk was lifted off my lower jaw, it didn't take any teeth or bits of teeth with it.

It did take over an hour in the chair, getting the teeth prepped by filing them down a bit and pushing nasty tasting string into the gums, then taking the moulds, and a wax impression of my bite; and most of the time with two loads of suction running to try and keep my mouth dry -- then finishing with fitting and gluing a new temporary on the decapitated one.

Meanwhile, passed 25000 miles going past Hardwick on the way into town.

Teeth again

Today, I had a dental appointment where the tooth on the right that I decapitated the other week would finally be measured for a crown.

I'd had the stump built up in the intervening time, and another temporary put on, but while that was going on part of a filling on the tooth behind had come off, so that would be being fixed too.

It didn't really matter that the temporary came off the stump the other week -- the gap left by that bit of filling falling off had meant that food was getting wedged there, and eventually the crown came off with the food (in this case a bacon and cheese brioche, where for a while I couldn't tell the temporary from the melted and now chewy bits of cheese around the edge).

The problem was that the tooth on the other side, also awaiting a crown, had started to crumble a bit, and that needed patching up, so today was another batch of running repairs, expected and unexpected, but no progress on crowns. The good news, though, was that after almost eighteen months, the gum by the tooth on the left is now healed enough that both of them can be worked on at an appointment next week.

If nothing else falls apart in the next six days...

If humanupgrades.com (not entirely SFW) weren't just a spoof, I would be queueing up to buy one of these--

This upgrade is truly revolution in dentistry. Not just because of the shape but also due to the materials and technologies.

With no interdental space there is almost no problem with the food remnants. The cleaning is the simpliest and easiest ever. Just a few motion with toothbrush and it is finished!

Thanks to the new N-DNA (neutral DNA cell) culture used for the tooth and the unique SRF (self reparation function) is the new tooth in normal circumstances almost undestroyable.

The SRF is invented by Human Upgrades Laboratories and provides nutrition of artificial N-DNA cultures. Organ with SRF can partialy repair it self.

I'd take it even without the SRF, myself.

Patchwork

One of the teeth that fell apart a bit last summer while eating brie fell completely to bits on some toffee on Wednesday.

I now have a temporary crown enthusiastically cemented to the stump.

So, even if the other crown candidate isn't quite ready in a couple of weeks, at least something can get done.

Nil illegitimis…

Just back from another session at the dentist of pre-work for getting last year's root-canal tooth crowned.

The gum is almost healed now that the temporary is holding the tooth together, but it's not yet ready for the rest of the work. So this was a session of tooth-filing. Not filling, filing. So I have been being ground down…

Over the last few years fillings that have meshed locally when I bite on the affected area, with my mouth full of cotton wool padding had managed to throw the global articulation off so that I could only bite on one side at a time. Since the root canal last year, I also had a tooth that was known to be cracked and I didn't want to put pressure on (even though it felt misshapen), which threw load onto the other side, and eventually caused cracking that led to Septembers' root canal.

Now, after an hour of biting onto articulating paper, and drilling to remove bits of fillings, I can now not only bite evenly on both sides, but, once more, bring my front teeth together (from the default slight underbite) to do things like tear sellotape!

W00t!!

Ouch

The last six weeks have gone roughly : toothache, fever, toothache, cold, tooth with abcess, root canal work part 1 of 3. Not fun. Not much enthusiasm to blog either. Just retardedness on ephemeral chat boards.

[Now playing - Planet Rock]

Teeth

Went to Sycamore House on Friday, and bumped into Neil and Angela who had had the same idea. Come dessert time, I choose the blackberry and apple cake and do my usual rant about ice-cream and teeth when it comes accompanied by ice-cream rather than, say, custard. I'm eating, and I find what feels like a large pip. Actually, it's the inboard quadrant of a molar that is one of the ones that have been sensitive to cold.

At least it's not been painful, and it will be patched up again this evening. But what I'd really like is an upgrade.

Teeth!

Tuesday evening, I had the interesting experience of trying to determine whether the loose bits floating around in my mouth were tooth (organically formed apatite) or crown (plastic shell over peg). Eventually I managed to determine that it was in fact the last veneer of tooth around a now mainly epoxy core of the tooth behind the two that are crowned.

So this morning it's into town to get it patched.

Seriously, if I have to upgrade in place, renewable teeth are the first thing on my list. Just as well it wasn't last week!

Lost Futures

So, this morning on the radio, we have news of the first serious challenge for the prize for the first private spacecraft happening soon - 40 miles up this time, the 100km arbitrary boundary scheduled for the next flight. This is more space as it should have been - for many years now (really since the last manned moon landing), I've been convinced that the accident of WWII and the Cold War put us into space about 70 years early, and that the vision of space travel that I grew up with would be something for the 2040s.

Later, in the dentist's chair, having a wisdom tooth filled without anaesthetic, I think quite how little that has changed. 21^st century dentistry means latex gloves, face masks and eye protection. Where are the laser drills (promised 40 years ago at least) or the cavity dissolving gels (10 years) or immunizations against harmful oral bacteria (~5 years), eh?

[Now playing - Noir Soundtrack 1]

I love my teeth

Just an obsession, brought to the fore by going out to dinner at Sycamore House, a nice little restaurant in Little Shelford (and this year's Good Food Guide), taking advantage of their February discount promotion. Now I'm not really one for sweet things at the best of times - primarily because a mouthful of sweet stuff tends to get my fillings going something rotten. Exacerbated by late 2002 involving such toothgrinding imbecility on the part of certain colleagues that I have worn patches on my teeth that are very temperature sensitive, ruling out ice-cream or sorbet.

Being late winter, I'd been hoping for something solid and carb-laden for dessert - a real pudding. But no - everything either ice-cream, sorbet, tooth-achingly sticky, chocolate (this does nothing for me, even in bars of organic 70% cocoa solids with cayenne, so counts as the previous), or sweet-fat dairy glop aka creème brulée (why?).

This downside of 1970's "if in doubt, drill it out" piecework NHS dentistry is having a truly bizarre upside in that it makes it easier to keep the weight under control. Except when I go for savoury pig-outs

Blah

It's the last rag end of autumn fading in dull grey into winter. My mood tells me that I've not been getting enough sunlight these last couple of days, so it's going to have to be SAD-hat time for the next few evenings at least.

Not that the world is helping. Setting aside imbecilities perpetrated by some of my colonial colleagues - not quite as bad as last year where tooth-grinding annoyance led to dental work - there's the whole world. If I put on the radio in the car, I have the choice of popular music stations (which seem to be 60+% motormouth presenters who are too full of themselves and seem to belive that we live for the sound of their voices, 20+% unlistenable music - manufactured pap or shouty stuff - and the rest mostly harmless), news and current affairs (which is either depressing [terrorism], boring [media self consumption - celebrity stuff, however masked as investigative journalism], or both [Westminster politics]), so in increasing Grumpy Old Git-dom, I end up listening to the Third Programme - which is fine when it's plain classical, or world music, but I still really, really, cannot stand opera, lieder and jazz that's sung in that sort of style.

Long in the tooth

Well, actually yesterday would have been a cycling day , weather-wise but I had to go to the dentist to have a check-up, which would have taken rather a long time under my own power. Fortunately, I got a clean(-ish) bill of health. There is one filling that's got a polished wear spot on, and a tooth nearby is sensitive to cold (checking this involved putting a little swab soaked in some alcohol/menthol stuff on the tooth and watching me in agony) - all of which I blame on certain of my colleagues driving me to impotent grinding of my teeth.

Some discussion of a confusion over patient records - someone suddenly seemed to have acquired a perfect set of teeth. Short of a rebuild, this would suggest having not been subject to NHS dentistry on piecework rates during the 1970s, which got me a couple of new fillings every six months from a guy who displayed his rugby blue more prominently than his dental certificates.

Perhaps I'm a bit obsessive about teeth as a result - it has certainly shown up in my recent fiction.

[Now playing - Labradford E Luxo So]