From as young as I can remember I was terrified of the
dentist. Every time my mum would take me
to an appointment my constant squirming and resistance whenever a dental tool
came close to my mouth made it virtually impossible for the dentist to give me
a check-up. In the end my parents were
told that I would have to go to a dentist that offered sedation for children.
Having the sedation at appointments was a bit of a game
changer for me. The happy gas they gave
me made me drowsy and relaxed, which meant that the dentist could carry out her
work without any fuss from me. I stopped
dreading the appointments for the rest of my childhood and through my teen
years, and they just became routine. I
knew that once I was sedated I could handle it all.
The problem came though when I got to the end of my teen
years and started work and no longer qualified for the free dentist
appointments, and it was on my own back to find and pay for a dentist. My solution to the problem was to just not
bother going at all, and I kept that going until some of my teeth started to
get very painful and sensitive.
At the age of 21 and living with constantly sensitive teeth
I finally plucked up the courage to find myself a dentist. It wasn’t much of a surprise to find that I
had quite a few cavities that needed filling, and knowing that I would have to
get them treated meant that some of my childhood anxiety crept in again. I didn’t even actually think to ask for
sedation, I just thought that was something they had given me as a child, but
that I couldn’t have as an adult. So I braved
having the cavities filled and everything went fine, I didn’t freak out or feel
like I couldn’t handle it.
So now that I had gone through dental treatment without
sedation as an adult I was fine to just carry on seeing the dentist regularly
right? Err no, I decided to leave it
another 4 and a half years till I was in massive amounts of pain from a gum
infection before I went to the dentist again.
Although I had proved to myself that I could handle things, whenever I thought
of the dentist all I remembered was my fears from my childhood, and that just
kept holding me back from voluntarily getting check-ups.
When I plucked up the courage to get treated for the gum
infection they found that I had another tooth that needed a filling, and so two
weeks later I booked in to have that seen to.
Despite the fact that I hadn’t had any real work done to my teeth in
over 4 years, I was surprisingly calm about the procedure on the day of the
appointment. That all changed though
once the dental drill started up. I was
freaking out and flinching every time the dentist had to drill further into my
tooth, and I felt terrified throughout the whole thing. At the end of the appointment the dentist
told me that I would probably need sedation next time I had something done as
she had struggled to carry out the procedure because of my nerves.
I had already made my mind up though that I wasn’t going to
the dentist again.
I made it 8 years without ever seeing a dentist. There were lots of things that I wasn’t happy
about with my mouth and teeth and that I would have liked looked at, but my
fear of having dental work done on me was too great for me to contemplate facing
it all. I felt that I was getting away with
not going to the dentist, but my biggest fear was something really bad happening
to one of my teeth and then being forced into going to the dentist. I managed to put the fear to the back of my
mind and thought that if it hadn’t happened in 8 years then it probably wasn’t going
to, until one Friday night in May this year I fractured my tooth.
I had been eating some chicken when suddenly I had felt a
sharp pain at the base of my tooth, I wasn’t sure what I had done at first
until I put my tongue against the tooth and felt a crack. The tooth hadn’t seemed to hurt since I had
caused the crack and it wasn’t sensitive to hot and cold or to being brushed so
I decided to see how it was the next day.
Waking up in the morning I realised that I hadn’t felt any pain in the
night, so I thought maybe it wasn’t as damaged as I had first assumed it to
be. I decided to test it by eating on
it, and that was a big mistake. The
tooth felt disjointed and every time I bit down it felt like glass was scraping
against my gums. It was Saturday morning
and I was due to go and stay in a hotel for the night for a family party in a
couple of hours, this was my absolute worst nightmare about damaging a tooth
coming true.
I phoned a dentist and as it was a bank holiday weekend the
earliest they could see me was on Tuesday.
I was terrified that my tooth was suddenly going to fall out or to erupt
in intense pain at any moment, but I had no choice but to go to the hotel for
the party. I got some extra strength pain
killers from the chemist and just went on the trip hoping that things would
hold out till Tuesday. In the end I made
it through the night away and the rest of the weekend without any pain in the
tooth developing.
I woke up on the day of my dentist appointment absolutely
terrified, although the tooth didn’t hurt, I was starting to feel some movement
around the crack especially if my teeth knocked together in the night. I kept thinking that maybe I was overreacting
and that the crack would heal on its own, but it was uncomfortable and I knew
that I could be leaving myself at risk of infection. I just had to be brave and get it looked at.
By the time that the dentist called me into his room that
day, I was a shaking and sweating nervous wreck. The dentist struggled to look at the tooth
and to take x rays as I was so jumpy and nervy, but in the end he managed to
confirm that I had fractured the cusp of my back tooth. To be honest I felt that the dentist I saw
that day just found my nerves an annoyance, and he did nothing to put my mind
at ease when he rattled off all of the things that might have to be done to fix
the problem including removing the tooth and having an implant at the cost of
£1000. He finished the appointment by
telling me that I could expect the fractured cusp to fall out any day, which sent
me into a sheer state of panic. I made
the appointment to have the procedure done under sedation in two and a half weeks’
time, but I was already praying that the tooth would somehow fix itself.
The two week wait for the appointment was horrible. I was too scared to go to sleep in case the
bit of fractured tooth came out in the night, and when I did manage to drop off
I slept fitfully worrying about how I would afford a £1000 dental bill. Every time I ate the fracture got knocked and
I could feel it flexing backwards and forwards, and towards the end it got
pretty uncomfortable. I was dreading the
procedure, but a big part of me just wanted my mouth to feel normal again.
As I left my Dad in the waiting room on the day of the
appointment, I acted as though I was being marched to my death. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that
in a matter of minutes someone was going to be breaking a bit of my tooth off –
On purpose! As I sat down in the chair I
was relieved to find that the dentist seemed a whole lot more understanding of
my nerves and immediately put my mind at ease and reassured me. I was pretty relieved when she told me that
the root of the tooth was not damaged and that I would just need a simple
filling to repair it. The gas sedation
began to kick in and I felt willing to let her do whatever needed to be done to
get the tooth sorted out. I got myself
ready for unbearable and endless minutes of drilling and the pain of my tooth
being broken, but in the end the old filling was drilled out in seconds and all
I felt was a slight tug when the fractured bit of tooth was removed. When the dentist told me that the work was
finished, I couldn’t believe that after all my fretting I had got through it
without any problems. To top off the
good feeling, the whole thing cost less than £100.
I know that going to the dentist isn’t a big deal to
everyone, but to somebody who had put it off for eight years, getting part of
my tooth removed and replaced was a big achievement and so I left the dentist
office feeling pretty proud of myself that day.
A month later and the tooth that was repaired feels pretty
great and there have been no further problems with it. I am taking the time to appreciate how much
better it feels than when it was fractured so that I don’t put off seeking
treatment again in the future. Now that
I have survived having some work done at the dentist I want to stick to having
regular check-ups so that my anxiety about going to the dentist doesn’t build
up again and result in my leaving it another eight years before I make an
appointment. If you have anxiety about visiting
a dentist and are putting it off out of fear, here are some tips from what
helped me:
1.
If you are worried about seeing the dentist
because you think your teeth are in really bad condition, then don’t be! They will
have seen a lot worse over the course of their careers.
2.
If you are scared about the dentist using the
drill on you during your appointment remember that the noise doesn’t equate to
pain, and the drills are so state of the art these days that they perform their
work in seconds.
3.
If you are a nervous patient then let them know
when you make the appointment so that they can give you the best dentist for
your needs to help put you at ease.
4.
Find a dentist that can offer you gas sedation
if you are very nervous, this helped me massively and it wears off in minutes
once the dental work is over.
5.
Don’t put off seeing a dentist because there is
something wrong with your mouth that you think could be serious. At the end of the day prevention is better
than cure, I had some lumps in my mouth that I was worried about but they
turned out to be nothing. It’s better to
find out if something is a problem and get it treated early on than to leave it
until it can’t be cured.
6.
If you need to get some treatment done don’t spend
the time before your appointment worrying about all the worst case scenarios
that could happen to you. That is what I
did and it made my nerves a lot worse.
Just remember that the dentist you are seeing is fully qualified and you
can trust them to carry out your treatment.
7.
Take a friend or family member to the
appointment with you if you are feeling very nervous, whether they come in to
the room with you and hold your hand or just sit in the waiting room, just
having somebody else there can be a massive comfort.
8.
Once you manage to face going to the dentist,
make a promise to yourself that you will get checked out regularly from that
point onwards. This is what I plan to do
now that I have got over some of the hurdles of my dental anxiety. Going regularly will help you to stay on top
of your nerves and will reduce the chances of you needing major dental work in
the future.
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