And more importantly, what’s an “unreasonable” length of time to have to wait and/or jump from dentist chair to dentist chair?
I had a tooth suddenly get painful in March. Went to my new dentist. (My old dentist retired recently.) The tooth is all decayed (the reason it suddenly started hurting was because it had broken) and needs a root canal, so I get the referral to the endodontist and get the root canal. When that heals, I go back to the regular dentist and he says that the root canal had to take more of the tooth than he expected, so now I need a distal wedge procedure. One periodontal procedure and 5 more weeks of healing later, I made the appointment with my regular dentist to get the crown. That appointment was scheduled for today, but yesterday I got a call from the dentist at 8:45am (I wasn’t awake yet, so they left a message) saying they had an emergency and would have to reschedule. I’ve called them 9 times between yesterday and today to try to reschedule and can’t get ahold of them. So…
Anyway, it’s been 6 months and my tooth is still half-done. No crown. He “built it up” to make it ready for a crown, I guess. And I’ve gotten the distal wedge done. So it should be all ready. But does all the waiting and logistics and stuff really take 6 over months to get a crown sometimes?
And, of course, I don’t even have a temporary crown yet, so I expect it to take significantly longer than it already has.
Now, the rest of this is a tangent, but I kindof suspect this wasn’t a cavity like he said, but rather a resorption. Aside from this, I haven’t had a cavity in 20 years. But I just had a resorption about 2.5 years ago. In the corresponding tooth symmetrically across from this one that’s getting the crown. Also, my regular dentist’s dental hygenist and both the endodontist and periodontist remarked that they’ve never seen a cavity on the back of the back-most top tooth like this one before. (Tooth number 2 if you’re keeping track. I had my wisdom teeth out like 20 years ago-ish.) And guess where the resorption was 2.5 years ago? (I mean, it was a resorption, so it started inside the tooth, but when it finally got to the outside surface…) it was on the back of my backmost top tooth.
Anyway, that part’s just a rant, but yeah. Am I wrong to be pissed at being strung along this long?
I got an emergency appointment within hours so they could do a temporary hotfix to relieve the pain so I could at least function as a human again, then I came back in after a week or so for the permanent fix, which obviously took longer and needed to be scheduled.
This is the correct answer
There’s no getting around the healing time between procedures, but that should have been factored in to your appointments from the start. Anything beyond the required healing plus about two weeks per appointment over the entire course seems excessive to me.
- exam confirms it’s more than a filling
- 4 days for next appointment and temporary crown
- 7 days to next appointment for final crown
Dentist was 100yds from my door.
About the same length of time for me. (I’m in the us in Minnesota ( just for reference))
My friend just had this done. From what I heard, it took multiple appointments and weeks to a month to get fully done. Maybe, and I don’t know this for a fact, the dentists just want to squeeze every dime from the insurance companies, but idk much about that subject so I could be wrong about why it takes a consult, a cleaning, the root canal, and the crown all in different visits. It is just my best guess.
I’ve had some major work done in my teeth,(more complicated than this) and I never had to wait that long from start to finish.
It does sound like your current dentist is having trouble managing appointments, but the general timeframe sounds about the same for when I had a root canal done. I had 4 separate appointments before the job was completely done. The first appointment at least stopped the pain, so I no longer felt like I was being stabbed with a knife in my mouth if I accidentally bit down on something with that tooth.
Maybe ask around other dentists if your current one is being unresponsive. Since you’vr already started the procedure you’ll definitely want to get it finished. I imagine leaving it half finished will only cause more problems for you down the line.
I had to get a root canal on 2 teeth that already had crowns, so a slightly different situation, but still took several months. First it took months and months to get a diagnosis that it was infected since the infection didn’t show up on normal x-rays and the dentist kept saying the tooth was fine (even though I had bouts of intense pain). I finally went to a specialist (periodontist I think) who immediately figured it out and used a special kind of x-ray to find the infection. And also that another nearby tooth also needed a root canal.
Then it took a month to get an appointment with the endodontist. She was great, but the one tooth was broken and couldn’t be saved. She went ahead and killed the root though, so it wouldn’t be so painful. There was also a lot of bone loss because the infection had gone on for so long. So another month to get back in with the first specialist to pull the bad tooth and do a bone graft (putting bone granules in the hole–very expensive but needed). Then weeks/months for things to heal including areas damaged by the infection. The whole saga went on for a year.
Just like with medical stuff, everyone is a specialist now and you have to go to different ones for each aspect of the problem. And each specialist takes a long time to get in to see. I wonder since yours is the very back tooth and it was in such bad shape if it would be easier/better to just pull it.
I experienced this. I had a tooth infection, so it was a literal emergency. Took 3 days to get seen. When I was in agonizing pain. It was awful. As for getting the temp filling replaced with a permanent one, I think it took 6 weeks, and that was the earliest I could get it. I believe they recommended I get it fixed in two weeks. I did call a lot of dentists to get this timeline done.
