By Alexander Germanis
Although they are meant to be times of great joy and hope, weddings can often be filled with anxiety, trepidation, and even outright fear. The caterer may suddenly go out of business, the alterations to the bride’s dress might not be done right, or the photographer gets sick and can’t make it!
But when everything else is going right, one does not expect the one thing to go wrong to be dental related.
Three months before Brooke was due to marry her sweetheart on the field at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, she was carrying on with her daily routine. While working the night shift at the Bloomington Police 911 emergency response center, she was just finishing her dinner when such a dental-related wedding crisis began.
“I had a crown on an upper front tooth and had already had some troubles with it,” Brooke begins. “Then I bit into a fortune cookie, of all things, and my crown broke off all the way up at the gum line.”
Repairing the crown was not an option, considering the extent of the damage. “There was nothing they could do,” she laments. “I was definitely worried and scared I wasn’t going to have a front tooth for my wedding.”
To make matters worse, the missing tooth made working difficult. “Insurance companies still consider implants to be cosmetic, so they don’t cover them,” Brooke explains. “I get that it can be a cosmetic thing, but when it’s a front tooth [you need replaced], you can’t talk. You use that to put your tongue against to make sounds. And talking was the majority of my job; it’s what I did for a living. It’s kind of impossible to do that when I have to put my hand up against my mouth to put pressure on it simply so I can actually talk.”
Fortunately for her, Brooke had already considered starting to use her fiancé’s dentist, Emil Verban, Jr. DDS. However, she feared there simply would not be enough time to get an implant in time for the wedding.
“[Dr. Verban] said he would get me as far along in the process as he could,” Brooke says. “He created an Invisalign mouthpiece for me that had an [artificial] tooth in it. So, when it was in place, it looked like I had a real tooth. People had no clue I was wearing it; they had no clue it was not my real tooth.”
As imperceptible as the Invasalign was, it was still just a means to an end. While returning home from her best friend’s wedding, Brooke wondered if she was still going to be wearing it one week later, when it was time for her to tie the knot.
“Dr. Verban was able to place a temporary tooth that I was able to wear for my wedding, so I didn’t have to wear the Invisalign,” she happily recalls. “It was a couple weeks after the wedding I actually had the permanent tooth put in.”
Since then, taking care of the implant has been as simple as brushing two to three times a day, flossing on a regular basis and getting regular check-ups. “You care for it like it’s your own tooth,” she explains. ”There is nothing truly additional — nothing out of the ordinary.”
It was that “nothing out of the ordinary” tooth that was able to give Brooke a truly out-of-the-ordinary wedding day.
“It was a great relief,” Brooke says. “By that point, I had no pain, no issues. Nobody noticed it; nobody thought anything about me not having my real tooth. Talk about wedding cake — this was the icing on the cake. To have it by that point was a great feeling.”
If you missed the previous articles on the dental implant procedure, you may read them online at www.HealthyCellsBN.com or contact Cheryl Eash at 309-664-2524.
For more information, you may contact Emil Verban, Jr., DDS at 309-662-8448, or visit www.mcleancountydental.com. McLean County Dental is located at 2103 E. Washington Street in Bloomington. Dr. Verban provides his patients both general dentistry expertise and the ability to provide specialized services such as cosmetic procedures and dental implants.
Photos courtesy of McLean County Dental