Dental fear

[CB2511]

Hi!

This is my first post on this forum. I've found other threads which have been a lot of help but I feel like I need to share how I'm feeling somewhere, I hope this is ok.

I'm currently (well, I have been for a while) suffering from a crippling fear of things going wrong with my teeth. It's getting worse, it's destroying my life at the moment and I don't know what to do.

I've always been a bit of an anxious person, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism about a year ago and treating that has helped massively.

I'm trying to figure this out the best I can. Early last year I had toothache for the first time in my life. I've never been scared of the dentists, I've had a horrible experience as a teen during an extraction and a couple of fillings but I still wasn't scared.

Early last year I had toothache for the first time in my life. It was terrible. I saw the emergency dentist who made some mistakes, I ended up having a root canal on the wrong tooth. This then led to over a year of pain because my dentist didn't think there was anything wrong. After a year of this the pain got worse, I saw a new (fantastic) dentist who said I had an infection and was surprised I'd lasted that long without it getting treated. The infection was in the tooth that was causing the pain early last year, the one that should have had the root canal originally but didn't.

Since I first got toothache last year I have been absolutely crippled with fear of things going wrong with my teeth. It's all I can think about. I'm obsessing over keeping my teeth clean, what I eat, every little niggle. When I saw my new dentist who said I was going to need a root canal on the infected tooth I cried and didn't sleep for the next two days. I keep imagining pain and panicking. I know most of it is in my imagination but it feels so so real.

I feel like I don't want my teeth anymore. They're too much worry. If they went away everything would be ok, my life would be ok. I don't feel like things are ok at the moment. I can't think of anything else. I have an ulcer in my mouth at the moment, no big deal, but I've spent the last two evenings crying because I'm imagining that it's an infection in the tooth that's just had a root canal and something terrible is going to happen.

I don't know what to do, how to fix this.

My husband is a psychiatrist. He says this isn't normal and has encouraged me to see my GP. I feel like I'm not worthy of my GPs help though, what if there's nothing they can do? What if this is all just silly, everyone feels the same about their teeth and I just need to get on with it?

I'm not really asking for any advice I suppose, I just needed to write this down somewhere. Thanks for reading!

[jedinat]

I dealt with this kind of thing a while back. In my case it was being informed of the fact that I had been grinding away at my front teeth and if I keep doing it they might be ground down to nothing later in life. I have small teeth to begin with, too, so grinding away at them is more of an issue, and it didn't help that I MADE TEETH FOR A LIVING, lol. So the subject was constantly in front of my face, all the time every day. My bottom front teeth, what's left of them, are tiny.

That anxiety went away when I started worrying about much worse things with much worse consequences, but that's another story...

Practically speaking, I recommend just brushing two times a day, flossing every other day, and not overdoing it because that can just be worse on your teeth. Use soft bristles, don't brush your gums away, and don't drink a lot of soda or acidic beverages. That's all you can do.

Every time you're tempted to look at your teeth, rub at them with your tongue, even thinking about them, try to consciously suppress it. Make your mind go blank. Maybe that's impossible. I just want you to know that this will pass if you give it time, I believe.

I used to take bathroom breaks at work to measure the length of my teeth against models of people with small teeth trying to assure myself they weren't THAT ground down/small. I think I only ever came across one that was close, lol. But that is all past. I don't think about my teeth at all anymore.

[raggamuffin]

Brush twice a day and floss.

Look out for starchy foods in your diet. Stuff like crisps/chips etc cling to your teeth and can promote decay faster than sweets and such.

If you can do your best to reduce a diet of processed food and up veg/fruit in greater quantities this can help with mood.

With these 2 things in place it should hopefully alleviate your fears of future dental issues.

[CB2511]

Thanks for the replies.

I think I do pretty well with brushing and diet (a bit too well probably, I'm quite obsessive about it). I don't know why this is such a problem. I recently had surgery on my ankle which didn't go to plan, has been quite painful and I'm going to need more surgery. This doesn't bother me one bit. I think I'd rather have the ankle surgery over and over again than have to have another root canal or an extraction. This makes no sense, the ankle surgery (two hours longer than they expected and lots of pain) was way more invasive than anything that could happen to my teeth.

I suppose fears and phobias just don't make sense though otherwise they would be easy to fix and wouldn't be so scary any more!