I went in for the first implant surgery today, to replace the missing three upper teeth from my January Broomball accident. For those of you who haven’t heard of dental implants (I hadn’t!), they’re roughly 1.5 cm titanium screws which are inserted into the bone where the tooth’s roots used to be, ending right under the gumline. Artificial teeth are then attached to those screws.

The impact shattered two teeth, so I had to have the left-behind roots extracted from my upper jaw. Between the injury itself and having to dig around a lot to get the roots out, I’m now missing the thin sheet of bone which runs over the front of the roots, for the canine side of the upper jaw. Luckily the bone near the middle is reasonably intact. This is problematic, because the implants need solid bone to anchor to. If, upon opening everything up, they found that there wasn’t enough bone to place the implants, I’d need a bone graft taken from my mandible behind the molars, and six months additional recovery for that graft to integrate. Luckily, this wasn’t the case! The implants took hold in the jaw even though the labial bone wasn’t intact. (Note to kids: another reason to get your calcium!)