I went to my consultation for surgery to remove my wisdom teeth this morning.
Subtracting what my dental insurance covers, it will cost me over $1100 out-of-pocket to have them out. There’s a chance that my regular health insurance may cover part of that. I’ll be finding out later.
Oh well. They’re just teeth. I don’t need healthy teeth in order to get to work every day.
are they actively bothering you, or do you just feel like you are supposed to get them removed?
Sometimes they bother me, although not recently. The biggest problem is that the two which are fully erupted are decaying, and the decay could spread to adjacent molars if they aren’t removed.
ok a really really stupid question (never had mine removed)
can they remove one to reduce the risk and then tackle the other later? or is it always done both at once?
My dentist recommended having them all out at once to get the pain over with once and for all.
I second his recommendation. Having those particular teeth pulled was worse than delivering a baby, IMHO.
i find that if you ignore them long enough they will hurt for like a week and then go back to just doing whatever it is they do back there.
(im in the same boat you are in, except i don’t have insurance right now.)
ugh! if you can avoid having them out, I would. I fought it for years. They were giving me migraine headaches and swelling up so bad I couldn’t sleep from time to time. But they’d only hurt for a bit and then they’d stop bothering. My mouth is crowded and I was told a million times to get them out. For awhile, I had a really good chiropractor who could make the swelling go down and get rid of the headaches every time they acted up, and then he moved to Australia! When we got insurance that would cover it, I decided to have them removed in order to get rid of the occasional headaches and swelling. I was told they’d put me to sleep, it would be no big deal and I’d get plenty of drugs for healing.
I was miserable!! For months!! They wouldn’t continue to give me drugs and the drugs they were giving me made me so high I hated being on them all the time anyway. I couldn’t drink alcohol. And I was still in pain. I took care of them immaculately and one side still got dry sockets.
I don’t swell up any more, but I dare say they weren’t always the cause of the migraines and therefore didn’t cure them, although I don’t seem to get as many general headaches. However, the sockets still ache from time to time (it’s been over a year.. I think) and my jaw area is still the source of many headaches. If I had to do it again, I’d find a chiropractor or massage therapist who could help me deal. Getting them out was one of the worst experiences of my life!
oh.. by the way.. disclaimer…. it may help to know that I’m deathly afraid of dentists and that tooth and jaw pain is the only kind of pain I can’t tolerate.
hmmm…
i had my wisdom tooth removed about 3 years ago… i’ll start by saying that my dentist is amazingly old-school. i only had 1 wisdom tooth on the top from the beginning, and he didn’t feel it was important to get the bottom ones out, since they were’nt really doing much of anything. but the one top tooth was rotting – much like yours, apparently – and he took it out.
he shot me up with novocaine, yanked the tooth out with a plier-looking thing, gave me some gauze and sent me on my way. it only cost about $200, without any dental insurance. so for me, it wasn’t that bad, despite days of anxiety beforehand; i’ve never had a cavity before, so that was my first dental procedure.
i didn’t need any gums cut beforehand, i didn’t need to be put under anesthesia, i didn’t need prescription drugs, and i was back to normal the next day. except that i wasn’t supposed to sneeze, as my wisdom tooth roots were perilously close to my sinuses, and he was afraid that a vigorous sneeze would explodey all that.
all that said, maybe you also would not need quite an expensive and mind-racking experience, and could shop around for another dentist? or does everyone go to the oral surgeon and get put under nowadays?
Re: hmmm…
from what i understand everyone goes to the oral surgeon now.
my dentist told me back in the day that i wouldn’t have to have them out or that we would just “wait and see how they come in”
i should mention that this was during a time when i actually had really good insurance and could’ve afforded to have the demonic little pearls out…
do dentists ever get tired of looking at teeth i wonder?
maybe he just was being lazy that day or had been in the room too long with the nitrous….
You bring yourself over here, I have a pair of pliers that’ll take them right out. I even have some codiene I can give ytou afterward.
definatly shop around. i remember hearing that UMBC did a certain number of procedures for free certain morning cuz they were practice for students…might be something to look into.
and trust me, get them all out at once and be put under.