Saturday, April 27, 2013

What happened to your tooth?

People close to me never fail to notice that my left front upper tooth is a bit crooked. Well, there's a story to it. Yesterday one of my friends who had his two front upper teeth extracted asked me about the appropriate time for him to start wearing dentures. So when I started lecturing him about dentures, he was surprised about my knowledge about them. When I told him  I once wear dentures he said I was pulling his legs. So I began to tell him the story of my crooked front upper tooth.

Human beings have two sets of teeth, the first set is normally called the milk teeth and the second set called the permanent teeth. I too had two sets of teeth, but somehow my front left upper milk tooth did not fall off naturally. It stayed in my upper gum when my other milk teeth dropped off and were replaced by permanent ones. 

When I was twelve or thirteen the dental officer at the government dental clinic just opposite my secondary school extracted my front left upper milk tooth with much pain suffered by me. But the expected secondary permanent tooth did not appear. So when I was sixteen or seventeen and after years of trying to hide my mouth when speaking I decided to wear dentures but with only one tooth.

When I was twenty-one and attending my job course I felt something was wrong with my dentures. They were loose. After checking with my gums I realised that my missing front left upper permanent tooth was starting to grow, so to speak. So I just abandoned my denture set.

After years of wearing a set of dentures I felt no shame when speaking even with a gaping tooth.Unlike those school years between the time my milk tooth was extracted and the time when I eventually wore a set of dentures. Of course my friends and lecturers kept asking me 'What happened to your tooth?'. So I answered proudly 'It is growing'.

But somehow the new tooth was a bit crooked because all these years its neighbours had encroached to its territory. Luckily the filler false tooth had kept them at bay. When the new tooth was about one year old I told one dental officer about my dental history. He answered this is something very rare.

But with a crooked tooth or not I never wore dentures ever since.    

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