Terri’s Patient Story: Single Tooth Implant Treatment

Patient StoriesSingle ToothLaboratoryShow All

20 Mar

Terri shares her experience of having single-tooth implant treatment at The Implant Centre, her broken tooth and how having an implant and crown feels better than her natural tooth.

For a long time, we’ve run artist open houses here. And that's when I started making these modular white pieces. This white marble dust really holds its whiteness for years and years and years. Gives you a very smooth surface that doesn't appear very resilient. It’s very nice. Not unlike the dental implant (crown).
I made those little birds that you can see out in the garden. This is one, they sit on a cane like that. But you see people doing this with them. That sense of liking the shape that you can hold in your hand, and that's part of the satisfaction of making anything three-dimensional. The tactile relationship you have with it, which is, I guess a bit like the tooth. Because you do have a tactile relationship with your tooth. Your tongue does, especially when it's first put in. My tongue was continually going just checking this tooth out. Going ‘Oh what’s that?’
The person making an implant has something to work to, there's a finished item that's got to look exactly like this and fit into this space. Match the size of the teeth around it. The colour has got to be exactly matching to the person’s teeth.
It's quite difficult, I would have thought. I had a tooth that had to come out. It was very broken. Just couldn't be resuscitated for another life. The Implant Centre was recommended by my dentist. People were welcoming and efficient. The staff were always very good at what they did. The surgeon and the dental nurses were careful to make sure that I was comfortable and knew what was happening.
It was all very well done. No one ever asks because no one knows. But if I say I've got an implant, they say, which one? It takes me a minute to remember which one it is because it just feels exactly like a normal tooth. It's brilliant. It's quite a lot of money, but I have to say it’s money well spent. It's completely and utterly functional, it really is.
There's no sense of it being anything other than just like all my other teeth, probably better. It will probably last longer than all my other teeth. When you consider that it’s very likely I’ll have this tooth for 30 years, maybe more. I’m 63 now. I could easily live to 93. That would be 30 years worth of tooth. And, if you divide that into the amount I paid which is about 2,000 pounds, that's not very much is it?