Imagine

In addition to the very cool imaging tool, the picture on the right is actually a bird's eye view of the "flap" that they grafted in. 

So, I met with Dr. C yesterday today. (I hate afternoon appointments and dealing with traffic. Do you remember the early days of lockdown and the traffic-free streets and highways? It was pure bliss!)

So when they put the plate/bone graft in place after re-sectioning the jaw, they didn't get the alignment exactly right. As a result, the one remaining molar on the right met its mate before the ones on the left met theirs. As a result it was very difficult to chew at all, and I couldn't even really chew on the "good side." But it was pretty close. So Dr. Ch, who is the one who is going to build the prosthesis, ground just a little off on the right to fix my bite, so chewing is now much easier! Good news.

But in the words of Arlo Guthrie, "That's not what I came to tell you about..."

In order to get that prosthesis to mate with the other teeth, and in order to figure out how many implants/mounts it needs, they took a scan of the inside of my mouth and of all of the teeth. I thought they were going to take me to the room where the xray device spins around your head, but that is for xrays and bones. For this they need to see the shape of all of the surfaces.

So they stick this wand in your mouth, between the cheek/gums and teeth and it takes a whole series of little tiny pictures that it stitches together in real time. The operator looks at the screen to see what areas might have been missed and then goes back over then. When it's done, it then calculated where contact is made and highlights those areas. Obviously, I have no idea how this thing works. They use this instead of taking impressions. And of course, once it's done, they can rotate it, zoom in, change perspective, whatever. The whole thing was VERY cool. 

Needless to say, getting the teeth to mesh (like gears) is important to how the whole chewing process works. And clearly these guys know what they are doing. So another 6 to 8 weeks to verify that the bite is good and to do some more planning for the mounts. The mounts are scheduled to go in at the end of July and the posthesis maybe the end of August, but more likely September...

Hey, the good news is that I no longer have a feeding tube going into my nose! But boy, I can't wait to eat a taco or a slice of pizza...guess I'll just hve to make do with another dish of ice cream.