A Tale of Two Patients

We had a patient the other day a patient came in early in the morning complaining of pain. He had a tooth in his mouth that was broken 3 years ago. He endured the pain by stuffing panadol into the stump of a tooth. Finally, he came in because the panadol was not working any more.

We gave him the specific injections to numb the broken tooth and all the gums and neighbouring teeth were numbed but the broken tooth could not be anaesthetisised. The reason is that because he left the tooth untreated for so long that his body had form a protective barrier around the borken tooth to prevent the infection from that tooth from spreading. This protective barrier is also barrier to the anaesthetic medicine from penetrating into the infected area.

The patient insisted that we take the tooth out despite the lack of anaesthesia on the broken tooth.

As the tooth was badly broken down, we were not able to grip the tooth with our forceps. We had to cut the tooth into three before we were able to take the tooth out.

On the same day, we had another patient whom we had earlier diagnosed as unsaveable. We had a set of dentures made before hand so that on that day, when we extracted the tooth we could give her a new set of dentures and she did not need to go a day without her teeth.

This is the result that you can get if your treatment is properly planned and executed unlike the earlier example which resulted in unnecessary pain and aesthetic issues with missing teeth.