Fiddler on the Woof: The Tooth Saga

2015 will go down in family history as the Year of Eric's Tooth. After about 6 months and way too many dental appointments, Eric's missing tooth has finally been replaced. I know this will come as a disappointment to everyone who grew fond of his gap-toothed smile over the past few months. This blog post is for you, so you can relive the good times.

Eric's tooth got knocked out when he was playing ice hockey back in March. He wasn't wearing a mouth guard that day because he couldn't find it in his gear, but he went to the game anyway. Because nothing bad ever happens in hockey, right? Right??? <insert foreboding background music>

The tooth broke clean off (see below):

Eric made an appointment with the first dental office that could see him that day and found out he would have to have an implant put in to replace the broken tooth with a fake one.

A few days later we got photos taken with the dogs at Corey Woodruff's photography studio. The photo session was scheduled before the tooth incident happened, and I didn't want to cancel on Corey at the last minute, so we went....and ended up with these now-legendary photos of Eric wearing his favorite sweater. Eric's coworkers had quite a field day passing around the photo above. I'm hoping it will end up on an Awkward Family Photos-type website someday.

You might be wondering why Eric didn't have a temporary fake tooth to wear while the implant was healing. Well, he did have a temporary fake tooth attached to a retainer. It only lasted for a few weeks before Buster got hold of it and ate it. Eric went to sleep one night with the retainer in his mouth, the retainer fell out while he was sleeping, and we awoke the next morning to Buster happily chomping away on it. He had already reduced it to bits. It was not salvageable and we opted to not spend another large chunk of money on a new retainer that Eric would only use for a short period of time <insert more foreboding music>. That's how Eric ended up sporting a gap-toothed smile for so long.

The tooth replacement process took much longer than expected because the dental office Eric went to was terrible. He was supposed to get the permanent replacement in early July. Due to multiple botched appointments and a "shortage of tooth parts" (who knew?) it took until late September for the tooth to finally get replaced. There were a few days when we felt like the tooth would never get replaced because the process seemed unending. But it eventually did end (finally) and everything is back to normal now, tooth-wise. Eric bought a new mouth guard so that nothing like this happens ever again.

Here are some more photos from the toothless period (imagine "Dreamweaver" playing in the background as you scroll through)