Just want to give a quick reminder to everyone that is is very important to floss daily. Not to toot my own horn but since I floss daily, I thought all adults over the age of 21 floss daily. So imagine my surprise when my sister declared that it’s been a long time since she flossed and my father’s dental emergencies emerged recently. I’ve been going to the dentist with my father the last couple of weeks because he had an abcessed tooth along with cavities under an old filling. His abcess was under an old root canal and he had to have the tooth extracted*. He didn’t realize the tooth had cracked and the abcess was there long enough to cause the jaw bone to degrade to the point that dental implant would probably not be an option for him. So take a lesson from my father’s travails: go to a (good) dentist regularly and maintain good dental hygiene so that even if you need dental implants, you can at least have enough jaw bone to get implants.
* My father was adamant that he did not want to have his abcessed tooth extracted and claimed that after the initial diagnosis, his gums no longer bled, pain was gone and that the dentist wasn’t 100% sure it was an abcess to begin with. I was insistent that he get his tooth extracted, which might have been influenced by my recent viewing of Ghost Town. Obviously, it was all psychosomatic since after getting a second opinion and the extraction, the true damage done by the abcess was greater than initially thought.
