Wednesday, May 16, 2007

CT Scan for Titanium Implants

Tuesday I went for a CT scan in preparation for a couple of titanium implants next Thursday. I swear I could feel the scan move down my head. The technicians said no-one had mentioned that before but I could feel a planar circular sensation rotating round and round and passing down my skull, most odd feeling!

Some while back I mentioned that I had 11 crowns (including 3 post and core) [1]. Here is the proof courtesy of the implant specialist Dr Ashok Sethi:

x-ray of whole mouthful of teeth

X-ray of whole mouthful of teeth

Below is the lower right 8 (on the left of the X-ray) that gave me such grief a while back [2]. But there will be no implant there. Raj will crown it and then wait till, one day, it eventually fails and then do two implants together.

x-ray of lower-right teeth

X-ray of lower right teeth (8 & missing 7)

No, the implants will be where I had the extraction last October [3]. The extraction was tricky because I had a "siamese" crown. The lower left 6 only had one root; the tooth having cracked the other root had to go. Half a root wasn't enough to take the strain of a crown so Raj crowned the two as a pair. See diagram below.
diagram of lower-left teeth

Diagram of lower left teeth (6 & 7)

Eventually the other half root went and so it took had to be extracted *from under the crown*. That meant separating the root from the cantilevered crown then easing the root out sideways - not as bad as it sounds. Now the extra strain on the remaining tooth has caused its root to crack so that too will have to go and two implants go in their place.

x-ray of lower-left teeth

X-ray of lower left teeth

4 comments:

Rosa said...

Wow, they let you keep the xrays! Cool. I love those things. Aren't they amazing? Lordy Mark, you are in for some work in there. I feel for ya. I was lucky last time after putting off going to the dentist for many years. I am going back next week for my permanent crown on my last lower right molar (TMI)--quite a chore getting back there. Then, of course, I am having my four old metal filling refilled with the new white stuff. Joy. Good luck my friend. I'll be thinking of you when I'm sitting in that chair clinching the armrests.

Rosa said...

PS Do you have two spines? hehe. The whole mouth xray shows two! (Sometimes I don't have a one. --do you say "spineless" over there meaning afraid of everything? ie The man was spineless when it came to asking women out.)

Anonymous said...

Here I thought that I had an expensive mouth! My three crowns, extracted teeth and more fillings than I can count don't even come close to your dental work!

I won't be feeding you Pork Scratchings when you come for the BBQ!

Good luck!

Mark McLellan said...

Rosa
Ashok is very hi-tech. His x-rays are digital so his secretary just popped them on a memory stick (aka jump drive). It was a 180 rotating scanner - only one spine, only one brain :-( And yes in UK English "spineless" does mean "lacking courage".

Andrea
Not cheap indeed. All at Harley Street prices. I am reluctant to blog the full running total but I could buy a small car! I am on a soft diet for the next couple of months. Not baby food but no crusty french bread, tough meat or very al dente veg and definitely NO pork scratchings.