Is no news always good news? I’ve been pondering that question the last couple of days as I awaited Dr. Lane’s response to Dr. Mark’s X-rays. The answer, when it came was still curiously inconclusive (tooth 5 looked like it had a problem on one X-ray, but on another it did not!), though we do seem to be narrowing the options. The extraction site over tooth number 3 definitely needs to be looked into, but Dr. Lane agrees with Dr. Mark that tooth number 5 is also ‘suspicious’. She said that particular tooth had decay at the top of a ‘deep’ filling there when it was drilled out in October, and because it was so deep in the root, any drilling might have caused a problem.
Oh, joy, a two for one sale! Leave it to me to have not just one problem, but potentially two. After reading Dr. Lane’s emailed opinion on the X-rays I sent, it’s clear I’ll need to find myself an oral surgeon who can cut around (under?over?) tooth 3 and its temporary bridge, and then to (potentially) extract tooth 5 if he/she needs to. Possibly saving that temporary bridge was good news, though, because it means I might not have to go back to deviled eggs, ground meats, and soup for Thanksgiving, which would have been necessary if I had to have it removed. Dr. Lane also said she would email any dentist I would be seeing before I saw him/her, and that she can easily email the Huggins’ protocol for an extraction, with complete information about what to do and how to do it.
All in all, this is probably the best answer I could have expected from such a distance. My plan is to go and get the work on tooth 3 done first, and then see how things feel after that. If nothing changes, we can be pretty certain that the problem with tooth 5 will also have to be addressed.
And if things do change? Well, some good news on that front would definitely be better than no news!