Temporaries - Getting closer to perfection

Dr. Golpa’s dental implants tend to heal quite quickly, however my own schedule prevented me from returning to Vegas for three months. You could easily move on the next step much sooner, and this time, it took about four days, including travel time. I again returned on the weekend so I only missed a couple days of work.

Getting your temporaries is actually a pretty big procedure, as the whole mouth is prepped for what is coming, and in my case, the work was extensive, involving almost every tooth in my mouth except a few on both sides in the very back of my mouth.

Again, Dr. Golpa and his staff breezed me through the procedure, using conscious sedation. Now the funny thing about conscious sedation is that you think you are awake and know what’s going on, but you are really pretty spaced out. On the other hand, it is relaxing and allows you to be pain and anxiety-free, and your sense of time is affected. What actually takes hours seems like minutes. And because you are not completely “out”, you return to normalcy fairly quickly. You will not be able to leave or drive away by yourself - Dr. Golpa’s staff will not allow it - and it is good to have a friend with you to shepherd you back to your hotel, which I did. You are going to want to sleep -and I did. I kept trying to look at my teeth, but I can’t tell you what I thought of them then - it’s all kind of a blur.

The next day I did see them. Temporaries are actually quite amazing - they do not begin to have the beauty your permanent, porcelain clad teeth will have - but you do have a full set of white teeth, no gaps, and a good sense of how they will look. They are nothing you would be ashamed to go out in or that anybody will notice as unusual. They certainly look better than the teeth that you had.

They do feel funny. They are basically all one piece, like a denture, and although they look like individual teeth, they aren’t, so it’s pretty much impossible to floss. After a few days, I felt a lot of irritation on my gums. I called Dr. Golpa’s office and they told me to use a Water Pik loaded with warm salt water. That did the trick, and if you don’t have a Water Pik, I highly recommend buying one before embarking on a full mouth reconstruction or smile makeover. I was also advised to use an antiseptic mouthwash.

Any other discomfort I had was pretty easily handled with Ibuprofen, although I was sent home with a pain prescription for a few Vicodin. I had a lot of work done and did have some throbbing from time to time, although it was never bad enough to miss work.

Getting your temporaries gives you a chance to adjust to how your new teeth will look too, and a word of warning - don’t put too much stock in your first impression of that. They are whiter than you are probably used to, they feel bigger and I found myself one night worrying that they just didn’t look right. This was a perception that was unanimously not shared by everyone else who saw me. I got many compliments on just my smile with temporaries, and was even told, “it changes your whole face”, meant in a good way.