I’m going to have cosmetic surgery! Actually to be more accurate I have to have cosmetic dental surgery, and I can’t say I’m thrilled about it.

Basically I had a long standing problem with one of my front teeth that was the result of a bike accident years ago. The tooth was broken at the root but this was not obvious from looking at it. After a few years it was decided to remove it and replace it with a crown. That procedure alone made me feel like I was falling apart I can tell you! But the crown didn’t look any different to my old tooth so it was all good.

That was until last year when the crown started to fail. After a few trips to the dentist to have it re-secured it was decided that I needed to have a dental implant, which as you can see in the gruesome illustration (on the right) involves screwing bits of carbon fibre into my jaw!

I’ve been putting this off for ages but today I had the preliminary stuff done in preparation for the surgery which will probably be done at the start of the new year. We have national healthcare over here so the crown and all the work relating to that only cost me $150, but unfortunately, would you believe, the upper four front teeth are not covered under the national dental-care, and even if they were implants are not covered. So this work is going to be 100% funded by me, and it’s set to cost $3500!!!

I can’t say I am excited about anything to do with this really, not the surgery nor the prospect of handing over such a whopper amount of money. But this is one of those things that has to be done. The silver lining in all of this is that the rest of my teeth are in superb condition according to my dentist. I’ve never had a filling or anything. Just typical that the first time something goes wrong with my teeth it would happen to be the most expensive thing possible. Ah well.

Is the surgery going to hurt? According to my dentist, who has his practice next door, it will be completely painless. They have a LCD screen mounted on the surgery room ceiling so patients can watch DVD’s while having treatments that take a long time such as this! Watching a movie while having stuff drilled into my head isn’t something that I can honestly get that excited about though, despite my dentists enthusiasm.