My ten-thousand dollar smile!

“I am not a specimen!”

At least, that was what I whatsapp-ed my curious friend who wanted to see a dental implant for what it truly is.

After countless visits to the prosthodontist, numerous X-rays, several moulds taken of my upper and lower jaws, I finally got my personalized tooth. Yes, a natural, tooth-enamel-coloured, translucent zirconium pre-molar. It was plugged firmly and cemented onto the exposed part of the shiny metal implant that stuck out of my gum.

That was the visible part. Somewhere within, I have a titanium screw of sorts drilled into my jaw. I don’t feel it anymore. I heard it fused very well with my bone. When it was screwed in, it was strange. I felt no pain (thanks to the effective, yet bitter-tasting, local anesthesia) but I still felt like some part of me was being hurt, or invaded, or …. I couldn’t explain. It was as if something was wrong, and there was something I should not have allowed.

I guess we should be thankful for pain. It serves as a good alarm that something is awfully wrong. Thus, it feels doubly wrong to feel no pain, when you most expect it in a procedure that has part of you probed, drilled and invaded by foreign bodies.

Anyway, thanks to painkillers and antibiotics, the unseen part of my implant went very well with my bone.

So, what does it feel like to have that empty slot on my gum plugged with a new prosthetic natural-looking tooth? (Ah, the oxymoron of the synthetic natural. Fact of life is this – it can never replace the real thing.)

Hmmmm. I miss that little gaping hole, that little slot that my tongue playfully probes once in a while. Now, there is a foreign body lodged there, as if it’s an everlasting sweet that I’ve stuck at the side of my cheek. My tongue naturally pushes against it, and tries to dislodge it.

Imagine you were chewing Mentos, and it got stuck onto your molar. You try very hard to dislodge that chewy lump that has moulded and wrapped itself around your molar. However, no matter how your probe and push around with your tongue, the stubborn Mentos lump just clings to your molar and refuses to come off.

Yes, kinda irritating. And so it is with my implant.

Man are highly adaptable creatures, this we already know, and this, I read recently in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel. I will learn to live with this tooth, and make it my very own. After all, it feels pretty amazing to chew evenly on both sides, something that everyone has taken for granted.

Therefore, I hereby announce the arrival of my complete ten-thousand-dollar smile on 24 Nov 2011! Cheers!