Dr. Frank Vascimini, Sound Bites, 02/19/13

Another week has gone by and I have another neat thing to tell you about being a dentist. A very close friend of mine broke his two front teeth this week.

When he broke his teeth off halfway to the gums, he found himself not raising his lip when smiling for fear that someone would see how he looked. Before this happened, he had never thought of himself as being self-conscious.

Knowing he was self-conscious about his appearance and that the edges were bothering him, I offered him to come in on my day off to make a temporary repair. He would have to see a specialist to address some issues before we restored him permanently.

After I finished the “temporary repair,” he looked at it and said “Why can’t we just leave it this way, it looks so good?”

We had already discussed that, because the tooth was so badly broken, the ideal solution was to place a crown on each of the broken teeth.

While addressing these two teeth, we were going to extend the crowns to another tooth that was missing.

He could not have replaced this missing tooth with an implant because of various reasons, and he wanted to avoid shaving down the adjacent teeth just to replace the missing tooth.

Once these two teeth broke, he thought this might be the right time to get that missing tooth replaced. This was the case until he saw my temporary solution. Though he realizes the crowns are more protective, his concern for shaving teeth down is greater.

It looks as though he will leave things as they are and hope the temporary solution (which in reality is a permanent white filling, or bonding, that I was using to hold him over until we had things ready to proceed to the crowns) works for a long period of time until something breaks again.

Let me get back to the neat thing. After the day had passed, I called him after dinner to joke with him about whether or not the filling was still in place.

He thanked me very sincerely, saying he feels so much better with the tooth built back up and he didn’t realize how he would feel with a broken tooth.

As we said good-bye, he thanked me again and said, “I can smile again.”

To me, this is neat. It is so nice to be able to make such a difference in someone’s life.

If there is someone you know thinking about dentistry as a career, let them know it is one of the greatest professions there is, and encourage them to shadow a dentist for a while to see if it is right for them. By the way, I would be happy to be the dentist they shadow.

Dr. Frank Vascimini is a dentist practicing in Homosassa. Send your questions to 4805 S. Suncoast Blvd., Homosassa, FL 34446 or email them to him at info@MasterpieceDentalStudio.com.