Getting a dental implant - does it hurt ?
First hand accounts of dental implant surgery

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How Pete got a dental implant and his dental implantation surgery experience:

On the 25th of April 2006 I finally got my first dental implant.
Left bottom jaw where my tooth number 6 used to be.

Having very low tolerance of dental pain, I got about 4 times the amount of anaesthetics that an average dental patient needs.
Even the dentist who did the implantation (I go to both Kromeriz dentists ) admitted that I am a lost cause but he's been telling me that for the past 8 years anyway.

I took antibiotics the day before, and on the afternoon of the operation took another antibiotic and one painkiller (Aulin) to pre-medicate myself.

Then in the dentist's chair, after getting 2 double doses of strong anaesthetic injections, the whole procedure took about 20 minutes.

I felt nothing when my gum was cut open, and only a very distant numb vibration when the jawbone was drilled.
This was done with a water cooled drill and took about 1 minute.
Another drill was used to make the hole wider - and took about 30 seconds.
And then a manual jaw bone drill was used, to actually do the screw thread into the jawbone into which the implant was then screwed.
This is basically just the bit of a drill which the dentist inserts at the top of the drilled hole and then turns manually by the use of a spanner sort of thing.
The manual screwing of the thread took about 4 minutes and I felt nothing at all as neither did I when the final implant was screwed into the threaded jawbone.

The stitching of the gums back together took about 8 minutes as it was a fiddly job towards the back of my mouth but I felt nothing at all.

Probably the worst I felt during the whole procedure were the two anaesthetics injections at the very start.

After the surgery, the anaesthetic wore off after about 4 hours and I felt no pain whatsoever, just some slight throbbing similar to after a tooth extraction.
The dentist said I might have to take painkillers.
I did not take a single one as there was no need to.
I did use ice packs for the first 4 nights as this keeps the swelling down.
In fact - I had minimal swelling the day after and from day three no swelling at all.

The only thing I felt afterwards were the 2 stitches in my gum with my tongue and a slight new pressure inside my jaw, similar probably to what one feels 2 weeks after being whacked in the jaw.
Only slight and this went away by the 5th day.
From day six I felt completely normal.
Well actually on day 6 I did take a painkiller but this was due to a headache I had gotten from overdoing it the night before with Slivovitz and nothing at all to do with the implant.

I was supposed to go back to the dentist after one week to get the stitches removed but I decided to take them out myself - which is what a lot of our dental patients do so as not to have to go to their dentist back home for this.
And since this is something myself and the dentists here recommend to patients as a no big deal - I wanted to see just how easy or hard this was going to be to do a diy job on removing the stitches.

I did this with tweezers, scissors ( a cigarette lighter to anaesthetize the scissors and tweezers) a dentist's mouth mirror, a good desk lamp and a shaving mirror, and all went fine.
From fiddling around I now know that:
The scissors need to be sharp - especially at their point - to cut the silk string, so I had to get another pair of manicure scissors which were sharper than my original ones.
And without the dentists mirror - I would not have been able to see behind my last existing tooth behind which at the back of my mouth the stitches were in the gum.
So you can either buy one of these dental mirrors at your local chemists (I presume) or the dentist over here will give you one for a couple of Euro (they have lots of used ones).

That's it. I now had a piece of Titanium in my head and airport metal detectors beware when Pete is around.

After a 3 months healing period - in July 2006 I then got the healing abutment on top of the implant.
This to enlarge the gum above the implant for the new crown.
At this same time the dentist took casts for the lab to make the crown.
A week after this, the healing abutment was removed, the final abutment inserted onto which the crown was fixed.
Now I can chew properly on my left side of mouth.

We've had quite a lot of patients over for dental implants and here are some of their impressions on their implantation surgery experience:

One lady patient had 6 adjacent implants done in one go in her top jaw.
She also had to have two sinus lifts one on each side at the same time.

This is considered as a massive dental surgery event.
She informed me that it was not a joyride during the surgery but after three days her swelled face started to return to normal.
She used ice packs to lessen the swelling and from the 4th day onwards most discomfort had disappeared.

Another dental patient from Switzerland told me that there was no pain during the procedure but he did feel a very strange sensation whilst the thread for the implant was being engraved inside the hole in his jawbone.
No pain but weird vibrations in the head.
He had no swelling until 1 week after the operation where the side of his mouth swelled up visibly for 3 days and then got back to normal.

Another patient had 1 implant and basically no pain, forgot to use the ice pack, took no painkillers and had no swelling.

Another dental implant patient had some swelling 4 days after the treatment which then went away after two days.

Yet another dental implant patient had 2 implants in the lower jaw, and after 5 days even got a clipable set of dentures fitted. He had no other teeth in his lower jaw.
These were removable but semi fixed dentures that can clip on and off the implant abutment (protruding spherical top of the implant).
He could eat comfortably straight away.

Dental Implant rejection

The dental statistic, which is basically a mathematical fact in dentistry, or one of the so called dental laws, is that about 1,5% of non bone graft or sinus lift implants will reject, and 3% of implants which were inserted with a bone graft or sinus lift will reject.

This is usually due to smoking after implantation, or just part of the statistics even without smoking and has all to do with the patient's body, and how it accepts or deals with a foreign titanium bolt inserted into the jaw bone.

From about 80 patients in the last year in all 2 implants have rejected on 2 separate patients, both of whom had sinus lifts and smoked after the implantation. Both went to separate dentists.
Mathematically this would be 2,4% so I guess we have another half patient to go yet.

If any dentist in the world tells you that he can guarantee that his implants won't reject, or have never before rejected, then he either has a God complex or has done very few implants in his career.

In Kromeriz and Zlin though, implants are guaranteed by both the dentist and Noble Biocare who produce them and if an implant rejects, if possible, a second attempt will be undertaken.
If that is the case - the second implant is free of charge, hence the guarantee.
If it is not viable to try again, then the patient get's the cost charge for the first implant back.

One of the patients above did not get an implant to replace the one that rejected and got a bridge instead.

The other patient above had a further sinus lift with another implant and all went well the second time round.
In this case a tomograph or CT was taken to evaluate the exact thickness of his bones before the dentist was convinced a second attempt at implantation was possible.

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What is it like getting a dental implant.
First hand accounts on the dental implant surgery procedure

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