A Toothache Can Kill You

But the good news is, a visit to your den­tist could lit­er­ally save your life. 

BTW — as much as I like using pho­tos to illus­trate a point, no wor­ries here, this post is safe to view at work, at home, around the kids, and will NOT upset your stom­ach at all.  No gory photos!

A Tooth Infec­tion is REALLY Close to Your Brain & Throat

As I men­tioned on our Face­book Fan Page ear­lier this week, it isn’t often that a gen­eral “fam­ily” den­tist gets the oppor­tu­nity to save a person’s life, but this week that hap­pened here at our south Char­lotte fam­ily den­tal office.  A young man came to us through 1–800-DENTIST, and he’d been absolutely mis­er­able for almost a month.  The right side of his face was severely swollen, to the point he couldn’t open his right eye, and he had dif­fi­culty open­ing his mouth enough for us even to take a look and iden­tify the prob­lem tooth.  He could barely even talk, and was clearly exhausted from not being able to sleep well for a long time.

With a good x-ray and brief exam, the prob­lem tooth was iden­ti­fied as an upper right molar (top right back jaw tooth) with a major cav­ity.  On the x-ray, it looked like the roots were close to the sinus, which explained why he had some really bad sinus pres­sure on that side, too.  Lit­er­ally, the tooth abscess had pen­e­trated his sinus.  And if the infec­tion was into his sinus, that meant it was not all that far from his brain.  As most any­one knows, pretty much ANY infec­tion that reaches the brain will put you in the hos­pi­tal, and even if you sur­vive, there is poten­tial for severe brain damage.

If a lower jaw tooth abscesses that bad, the risk is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent: the infec­tion can spread through spaces between dif­fer­ent tis­sue lev­els under the tongue, down the throat, and if it gets bad enough, can force your esoph­a­gus (your food goes down that) and tra­chea (the way air gets to your lungs) closed.  That means you can’t either eat or breathe!

Please Take a Den­tal Abscess Seriously!

After see­ing the young man, we real­ized we had to act quickly, or he would end up in the hos­pi­tal within 24 hours (prob­a­bly a lot less than that).  Antibi­otics, unless they are given by an IV or in extremely high doses, can take 12–24 hours before they build up to an effec­tive level in your blood, so they don’t work that fast!  We made time in our sched­ule and were not only able to remove the tooth, but to drain an incred­i­ble amount of the infec­tion away.  He could actu­ally open his eye by the time he left!  But if we hadn’t seen him imme­di­ately, the incred­i­ble pres­sure from the infec­tion would have just con­tin­ued to build, the pain would have wors­ened, and even­tu­ally the infec­tion would have forced its way, through what­ever tiny space it could find, into his brain.

The Mouth is the Gate­way to the Whole Body

It’s sad that more of the pub­lic isn’t made aware of how deadly a tooth abscess can be; peo­ple think to them­selves, “It’s only a tooth/my gums, after all.”  But the teeth and gums pro­vide a direct path into the rest of your body, and you have some extremely vital organs very close by.  Please don’t kid yourself.…..if there is major swelling of the face, it is SERIOUS.

A Happy End­ing

The good news in this story, is that we’ve seen the young man back each of the last 2 days to follow-up.  While the swelling hasn’t dis­ap­peared com­pletely (the antibi­otics will even­tu­ally take care of that), today he was able to actu­ally smile when he shook my hand, and after 2 nights of awe­some sleep, he said that he feels like a new man.

And that, dear friends, is one of the rea­sons I absolutely LOVE being a dentist!

To make an appoint­ment for a Com­pli­men­tary Consultation:

Request an Appoint­ment Online or call us at 704–364-7069.

We’ll look for­ward to meet­ing you soon!