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tooth on my implant
Monday, October 17 2022
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I drove through the drizzly rain to my dentist this morning to finally have a new tooth placed atop the implant that was installed back in late June. I didn't have to wait long before I was led to back to the room and my x-rays were brought up on a screen (this time I remembered to take photographs). The dentist shot some local anæsthetic into the gum where the tooth would go, since he'd have to be doing some digging around in there. He said he could see the implant peeking through, but I'd never seen or felt it and had actually feared it might've somehow fallen out around the time the stitches came out on their own (in Philadelphia). But then the dentist took an x-ray of it and I realized it wasn't designed as I'd though it was. Instead of being a post onto which a tooth would be put, it was a threaded metal socket. The dentist proceeded to turn a post into that socket (I feared he might be over-tightening it) and then he collected data that would be needed to mill out a replacement tooth. This included the color it needed to be (matching as best he could my "two-tone teeth) and then scanning the area with his fancy 3D scanner. I'd assumed I'd be returning to get the tooth on a later date, but no, I was directed to the waiting room to wait for the tooth to be milled there on site. The assistant told me it would take a half hour, but it was closer to an hour.
And then, there it was, the tooth. The dentist trusted his assistant to do some initial grinding of it (apparently something that needs to be done manually) and then the two of them glued it into place. Finally, the dentist ground away the places where the new tooth was bumping into my lower incisors, and then we were done.
Somehow when the dentist had quoted me the price for all this, I'd assumed it included the crown with the implant, but apparently I was wrong; the crown cost an extra $1000. Hopefully I will never have to spend another dime on that cursed punk rock tooth.
Back home, I had trouble focusing on my workplace work because it was so demoralizing. It's hard to debug something when it takes a couple minutes to set up every test and there are no line numbers provided with the inevitable errors. So instead I did things like watching the ninth episode of House of the Dragon, the one featuring the inevitable palace power struggle upon the death of the king. What I didn't expect, though, was the sudden appearance of a dragon. That was bad-ass!
Meanwhile, my new crown wasn't entirely comfortable. It wasn't painful, but it felt sort of like something big was caught in my teeth. The new tooth was perhaps shouldering too closely to its neighbors, and when I'd bite on things, I could feel the crescent of teeth in my upper jaw flexing just a bit into the new tooth. Also, the injuries in the gum necessary to accommodate the new tooth had a slightly metallic taste to them, similar to canker sores. Hopefully that will go away as the gum heals.
While Gretchen was out having very not-good spaghetti with Nancy (Enzo's Ristorante is both old-school and bad) and then seeing a movie, I took a nice hot bath to relax the many aching muscles in my back, the inevitable consequence of this past weekend's backbreaking labor.
Then after my bath, I returned to my computer and did some workplace work. I figured out that the thing I wanted to do with Excel spreadsheets was best done using a template spreadsheet prepared in Excel itself. This needed to be available for the the EPPlus library to slurp in and then add to, so that additional parts could be generated programmatically. But having a file reliably available from within a .NET application means compiling it into something called an "assembly" (these are code-containg files with familiar endings such as .exe and .dll). I've had trouble doing this in the past, but today I pulled it off. In so doing, though, I managed to screw the entire project up in a way that was impossible to fix via Googling solutions. I was getting errors telling me that "Properties is a namespace but used like a type," a message that Google produced zero hits for. The problem must've come when I added the Excel spreadsheet file to the project's "resources," which had previously had none of. This led me to compare the new XML for the .NET project to the one from before the change I'd made, and I saw that indeed it had a new XML node in it:
By deleting that node, the project no longer had errors, suggesting that this node alone was somehow polluting the namespaces in the project. This lead me to check to see what Visual Studio thought a <Properties> type's full name was under the working code, and that was when I learned it was something project-specific. By replacing <Properties> with <fullnamespacename.Properties> (and making similar changes elsewhere in the code), I was able to get the code with the new resource to compile successfully. It's precisely these kind of hard-won battles that eventually leads to computer environment mastery, and it was enormously satisfying.
My x-rays, from before the new implant was imaged.
The one with the black void at the root around a white metal core
is my "punk rock tooth" from before it was extracted in late June.
Click to enlarge.
Me with a missing tooth, shortly before today's crown was installed.
Me later with my new crown back in Hurley.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?221017 feedback
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