First thing this morning I had a dentist appointment. I went a few weeks ago with a tooth that was causing a twinge of pain when I bit down on something. My dentist said it was a cracked molar. Normally he’d fit a crown, but he thought it might be fixable with just a bit of a filling, so that’s what he did. Unfortunately it didn’t work and the tooth was still painful, so I went in again today to have the crown preparation done. This involves having several moulds made of the teeth using a quick setting rubber material, then the offending tooth is drilled and ground down to allow the crown material to be installed on top. The new crown is fabricated offline from the moulds, and I have to go back in a week to have that fitted. In the meantime the dentist has installed a temporary plastic crown, which he told me not to floss or chew with, as it is fixed only weakly and could come off if I’m not careful.
So, yeah. The anaesthetic didn’t wear off until a late lunchtime. Having tried to eat with dental anaesthetic in effect before, I waited it out this time to make sure I didn’t chew up the inside of my cheeks. Anyway, all this ate up the morning and I felt a bit unenthusiastic about doing much for the rest of the day. What I did was wash the car, which was way overdue, looking very dusty thanks to the extended period without rain, followed by the couple of rainy days we had last week to move all the dirt around and make it more obvious.
Oh, and I found this photo that a Reddit user took yesterday of a diamond python at my local railway station, just a few hundred metres from my home. And here’s a video. Pretty cool!
New content today:
I’ve had that procedure done years ago, but the two crowns I’ve had in the last couple years were done onsite, by a mini computer operated tooth lathe.
No molds were made, they used a 3d scanner with the lens at the end of a pencil like attachment that fits in your mouth. After taking pics of the offending tooth for about 2 minutes from different angles, they put a tooth “blank” in the lathe, and the dentist goes to work on grinding your real tooth down to a stub while the lathe makes the crown. 30-60 minutes later, they glue the crown in and check the bite. If the bite needs tweaked a bit, they can grind down the new crown a bit after installation.