Sparky brought home my extracted tooth yesterday after his visit to my dentist (I'm going to start calling him "Dr. C" just to make it easier) to get his teeth cleaned. The tooth was sent to Dr. C, and he looked at it and noticed that there was still an infection at the end of one of the roots and it was making the dentin soft. VERY soft. I took a good look at it last night and saw the same thing. Okay, sooooooooo....... I think I'm starting to put some puzzle pieces together, and figuring this out little by little what happened when I got really sick 2 and a half years ago when I thought this all started, but it started long before that. Just for the sake of having it in print, I am going to share my thoughts on how it all happened, so humor me, please!
All the amalgam in general as well as the original root canaled teeth still probably have something to do with this, but I'm going to pinpoint just this particular tooth for this part of the puzzle and what part it possibly played in the collapse of my health.
Let's look back to my teenage years, which was roughly 20 years ago. I got a cavity in this particular tooth (#18). I went to the dentist and had it filled with an amalgam filling. Since amalgam fillings only have a supposed life of 10 years, I should have had it replaced 10 years ago. I didn't. Sparky and I, in our young married years, saw a lot of different dentists because we hadn't found anyone we were really happy with. One dentist was too rough, another was too expensive, another didn't care that I tasted metal in my mouth after he placed a filling, and yet another called us all the time to set up cleaning appointments way too often, etc. When we finally found a dentist that we stuck with for several years (but still wasn't crazy about) he suggested I needed a LOT more work, and a LOT more amalgam fillings. We couldn't afford it, neither in time nor in funds, so we put him off. That tooth in particular, #18, he proposed an amalgam filling with a precious metal crown over it. Yep....precious metal. Not only mercury in the amalgam, but metal on top of it. I didn't do it, even though I didn't know the dangers at the time.
Okay, back to the timeline... four years and two babies (with very hard pregnancies as well as a miscarriage) later, I still did not have the work done. And the filling was failing. I mention the hard pregnancies and the miscarriage because I've read mercury can play an integral part in both.
At this time, I was introduced to some wonderful (and I do mean wonderful) whole-food products by a good friend, and I started buying them and using them faithfully. Some of these items, like I mentioned in an earlier post about Fortune Delight, were also cleansing in nature. These products did a lot of good for me, and I probably would have been a lot worse off had I not had them because I was full of the silver poison! I also started using some special toothpaste and tooth whitening products from this company. The stuff is great for someone who doesn't have 26 amalgam fillings! These awesome products cleaned my teeth... too well. It totally cleaned off any type of residue that was keeping the mercury from seeping out so quickly from my teeth into my body.
Back to the tooth: by this time, the filling in #18 had failed. But I still wasn't seeing the dentist because it didn't hurt. It was only unknowingly draining every ounce of mercury and mercury vapor into my body. By February 2005, I came down with a nasty case of what the nurse practitioner at a clinic told me over the phone was bronchitis. I struggled with that for a couple of weeks, and even when I look back at pictures during that time period, the pictures don't even look like me.
A few months (and a lot of stress from every where in my life) later, I ended up going on antibiotics for strep throat. Within a few days I would start feeling sick like I've never felt before. At that point my whole world turned upside down, and I was on a quick roll down a loooooooong sloping hill. My doctor didn't even know how to help me, and later on he told me that I freaked him out because he couldn't figure out what was wrong with me.
I continued to stay sick and muddle through until the following March when I was asked by a friend if I thought my amalgams could be the cause. The light went on. I started a little bit of research and came to a conclusion that it just might be it since I had almost as many fillings as I had teeth. It took six months, however, before a dentist could ever touch my teeth, because I couldn't function. On my good days I had to make up for the several bad and catch up on everything else. I did go and see Dr. K in June hoping to get started soon, but an accident broke his ankle and he was out of work for a couple of months. He introduced me to Dr. C for Peanut, but I decided I needed to see him, too.
As Dr. C made his way around my mouth that September, working on teeth and replacing the amalgam, he came to #18 tooth this last spring. He cleaned it out but noticed it was a deep decay under the filling and into the root. He tried to save the tooth anyway, but it was too late. Within a couple of weeks I was back in the dentist chair, and the root canal happened. A few weeks after that and my health started sinking lower again, this time the pain that came with it was unbearable at best. I had neck pain and head pain and head spasms and dizzy spells. Dr. C was convinced he took out all of the root when he did the root canal, and as you've read in previous blogs, he kept trying to help relieve the pain by changing the occlusion. Then this last Monday came, and I had had enough. The tooth was extracted, and it almost has completely come to an end, except.... I was lied to (but not purposefully) by the oral surgeon. It happened because the ADA has chosen to lie to their dentists and oral surgeons, and he didn't know any better. And I'm frustrated beyond belief.
When I went to the oral surgeon on Monday, I specifically asked that they would remove the periodontal ligament after he removed the tooth. He looked at me very strangely and told me that the periodontal ligament comes out with the tooth and I would be just fine. Well, according to Dr. K in the cities and some websites that I've placed in previous posts, some of the ligament stays with the bone and needs to be ground out with a dental burr. This will stop cavitation from happening and eventual disease in the rest of the body. Now I knew this, but I couldn't get this doctor to understand my need for it to be done (nor did he probably know how to do it). I contacted Dr. K today, and asked him to refer me to one of his oral surgeons who DOES take care of this. My concern for this to get done is not only for my longterm health, but the antibiotics that I was put on on Monday still has not started to work because the ligament is still there holding onto anaerobic bacteria.
I think the hardest part of all of this is that I keep seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, but someone keeps moving it farther as I inch up! Anyway, this is how I see this tooth playing a part in the collapse of my health. It's just one piece of the puzzle, but I think a huge, important one. It was a big tooth, with big roots.
Now as my kids hug me when I don't feel well, I tell them both...don't let this happen to you! Please take care of your teeth! Please brush often, and please think about what you put in your body! ...And that goes for you all, too!
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