When I was young, I grew up in a very poor family. We didn’t get the greatest dental care. Anybody who’s ever had sort of loosely available dental care knows that a lot of the…especially back in…this would have been in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. The automatic response to a cavity was to pull the tooth. And it wasn’t long before I had spacing in the normal number of teeth I would have. Matter of fact, I still have all of my wisdom teeth. Because my teeth have shifted forward enough, they didn’t create any problems at the back. They shifted so far forward that they were actually starting to tilt when we started doing work. And I was beginning to get the early symptoms of TMJ. There would be anticipation of pain, it happened often enough.
I also had crowding in the front part of my teeth. I didn’t really realize until starting working with folks here, a lot of that also had to do with the removal of teeth. So my mouth space had pulled in, which caused crowding up toward the front. So there were several things. When we started working here, it was the pain in the jaw that got us looking into it. Also, I’m older, and just the wear of the teeth had started to make it so that they were shorter in the mouth stuff. So we started working with the teeth you could save, and then the crowns that we replaced and put in to raise the bite up and fix the bite line.
Over a period of a couple of years, that actually caused my bite to widen and be able to actually…my tongue would fit in the bottom of my mouth again, which is kind of wonderful. And from the back forward, like the wisdom teeth straightened back up in there, they became kind of back molars, things tightened up, the crowns were a little wider, so they would fit in there. And we basically ended up getting both the tops and the bottoms on both sides of my mouth biting real again.
And we finished all of those. And all the TMJ went away, and the biting got kind of back to…kind of? Totally back to normal. Then we started talking about…so by then my front teeth had sort of become my primary bite surfaces because the backs weren’t biting right, so they had worn down over the years with aging, and they were discolored, just kind of ugly. So we started talking about veneers for the front. And in that front talking about tying in this sort of call it functional cantilever bridge basically not to break my mouth open into a cosmetic blending of the teeth in the top row. There was almost zero adaptation time getting used to it other than the fact that I’d gone into this for basically 60 years never having smiled. Now I can, I have teeth, but I didn’t have the muscles to do the smiling. That was sort of the hardest adjustment, not the new teeth but the new face at that point.
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That’s paramount because I have other medical issues. And so him knowing that, taking that into consideration, that’s very important because of some of the things I have, I have a cardiac issue. He knows that. So there are certain things that I can do and can’t do, and so therefore he gives me options. I feel comfortable with that. If you don’t feel comfortable with a doctor, you’re not going to do what they say, right? And you’re going to always feel nervous and concerned with him. I don’t feel concerned at all. And I don’t get nervous about coming to the dentist. Don’t like it. Who loves coming to the dentist? Right? But I don’t feel nervous with him.
Read Transcript
I had a rotated tooth, we call it, and it was one of my laterals, which is the one next to your front two big teeth. And it was rotated to a point where from the front it was okay. From the side, you could definitely tell that it was out of alignment, and we called it my snaggle tooth whole, like, growing up. So when I first started working for Dr. Keene, he actually fixed it with composite, which is a plastic material, which is not strong and inevitably broke. So at that point, we did a single veneer. And just because of the way that I’m built, there was a lot of other issues, but it didn’t fit in with my smile. It was a small tooth compared to the rest. It wasn’t proportionate. That, mixed with what we call a cant, where my two front teeth were sort of tilted to a position, it just was an awkward smile for me, you know. And then working in dental, you start to notice the little nuances of these teeth. And so I felt like it was time to fix that. And I had the opportunity to do so, and that’s why we got my teeth done.
I really wanted it to look natural. We’ve had a lot of patients that come in, and they are having veneers that have been redone because they come in with what people will call the chiclets, right? And so they’re just all the same shape and squared off. And once you have the knowledge that Dr. Keene and I have attained through several cosmetic courses and things like that, you notice these things other people don’t. That was a huge thing for me was to keep it natural and to have it be still my smile, but just improved. And so we were able to accomplish that without getting into all the clinical boring stuff. It was really nice to have that hands-on opportunity and to do it with the person that I’ve seen do it on so many others and trust that work and that whole process from start to finish.
I love my smile. I love my smile. They’re still part of you, as anyone who’s ever had to have any cosmetic work done or wanted it done or have issues with their smile, it’s like the ghost limb, right? You still have that consciousness that you grew up with of not wanting to beam a big bright smile across the room because of X, Y, or Z. And I have to stop myself sometimes and realize, it’s okay, smile big because it’s not that derpy crooked smile I grew up with, and that is a good feeling.
When I was young, I grew up in a very poor family. We didn’t get the greatest dental care. Anybody who’s ever had sort of loosely available dental care knows that a lot of the…especially back in…this would have been in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. The automatic response to a cavity was to pull the tooth. And it wasn’t long before I had spacing in the normal number of teeth I would have. Matter of fact, I still have all of my wisdom teeth. Because my teeth have shifted forward enough, they didn’t create any problems at the back. They shifted so far forward that they were actually starting to tilt when we started doing work. And I was beginning to get the early symptoms of TMJ. There would be anticipation of pain, it happened often enough.
I also had crowding in the front part of my teeth. I didn’t really realize until starting working with folks here, a lot of that also had to do with the removal of teeth. So my mouth space had pulled in, which caused crowding up toward the front. So there were several things. When we started working here, it was the pain in the jaw that got us looking into it. Also, I’m older, and just the wear of the teeth had started to make it so that they were shorter in the mouth stuff. So we started working with the teeth you could save, and then the crowns that we replaced and put in to raise the bite up and fix the bite line.
Over a period of a couple of years, that actually caused my bite to widen and be able to actually…my tongue would fit in the bottom of my mouth again, which is kind of wonderful. And from the back forward, like the wisdom teeth straightened back up in there, they became kind of back molars, things tightened up, the crowns were a little wider, so they would fit in there. And we basically ended up getting both the tops and the bottoms on both sides of my mouth biting real again.
And we finished all of those. And all the TMJ went away, and the biting got kind of back to…kind of? Totally back to normal. Then we started talking about…so by then my front teeth had sort of become my primary bite surfaces because the backs weren’t biting right, so they had worn down over the years with aging, and they were discolored, just kind of ugly. So we started talking about veneers for the front. And in that front talking about tying in this sort of call it functional cantilever bridge basically not to break my mouth open into a cosmetic blending of the teeth in the top row. There was almost zero adaptation time getting used to it other than the fact that I’d gone into this for basically 60 years never having smiled. Now I can, I have teeth, but I didn’t have the muscles to do the smiling. That was sort of the hardest adjustment, not the new teeth but the new face at that point.
That’s paramount because I have other medical issues. And so him knowing that, taking that into consideration, that’s very important because of some of the things I have, I have a cardiac issue. He knows that. So there are certain things that I can do and can’t do, and so therefore he gives me options. I feel comfortable with that. If you don’t feel comfortable with a doctor, you’re not going to do what they say, right? And you’re going to always feel nervous and concerned with him. I don’t feel concerned at all. And I don’t get nervous about coming to the dentist. Don’t like it. Who loves coming to the dentist? Right? But I don’t feel nervous with him.
I had a rotated tooth, we call it, and it was one of my laterals, which is the one next to your front two big teeth. And it was rotated to a point where from the front it was okay. From the side, you could definitely tell that it was out of alignment, and we called it my snaggle tooth whole, like, growing up. So when I first started working for Dr. Keene, he actually fixed it with composite, which is a plastic material, which is not strong and inevitably broke. So at that point, we did a single veneer. And just because of the way that I’m built, there was a lot of other issues, but it didn’t fit in with my smile. It was a small tooth compared to the rest. It wasn’t proportionate. That, mixed with what we call a cant, where my two front teeth were sort of tilted to a position, it just was an awkward smile for me, you know. And then working in dental, you start to notice the little nuances of these teeth. And so I felt like it was time to fix that. And I had the opportunity to do so, and that’s why we got my teeth done.
I really wanted it to look natural. We’ve had a lot of patients that come in, and they are having veneers that have been redone because they come in with what people will call the chiclets, right? And so they’re just all the same shape and squared off. And once you have the knowledge that Dr. Keene and I have attained through several cosmetic courses and things like that, you notice these things other people don’t. That was a huge thing for me was to keep it natural and to have it be still my smile, but just improved. And so we were able to accomplish that without getting into all the clinical boring stuff. It was really nice to have that hands-on opportunity and to do it with the person that I’ve seen do it on so many others and trust that work and that whole process from start to finish.
I love my smile. I love my smile. They’re still part of you, as anyone who’s ever had to have any cosmetic work done or wanted it done or have issues with their smile, it’s like the ghost limb, right? You still have that consciousness that you grew up with of not wanting to beam a big bright smile across the room because of X, Y, or Z. And I have to stop myself sometimes and realize, it’s okay, smile big because it’s not that derpy crooked smile I grew up with, and that is a good feeling.