Rotten Teeth! I only found out CF = bad teeth a few years ago. Given the chance(s), to cosmetically fix my horrid teeth growing up, I would have found the money myself. The most durable dental work was a wholesale job involving a dozen or more fillings at a time. I was about 15 when my molars went silver.
A suggestion for young CFers and their families is having teeth sealed as secondary teeth come in. Insurance didn’t cover my niece, she is CF free, and the $30/tooth seems worth the expense. The sealing is too new for me to make any claims but her dentist’s “sealed patients” have an adolescent decade free of cavities and more. This isn’t uncommon, most pediatric dentists offer this.
I have been able to afford good dental work as an adult and have a number of crowns. I also have a major overbite and was born without seeds of adult canines. My smile hides under a beard and mustache and I hate it, I am a natural smiler! Being able to afford good dental work has its limits and crowning, implanting and other work needed to give me a presentable smile for my remaining years is hard to justify.
My dentist is also a bit of a snob when it comes to veneers, somewhat justifiably so considering most people have some problems with veneers popping off and such. The dental work done at 15 is still good as well as every crown in my mouth and this is what dentists expect of their work. My last crown could have paid for a couple sets of veneers.
As long as veneers don’t preclude a crown done at a later time and the veneer repairs don’t take away more tooth each time, I see no reason to avoid them. Crowns are generally permanent I have more than one close to fifty years old.
Staining and pit cavities on my front teeth make for a pretty unattractive smile. The sources of our bad teeth are pretty serious problems from weak amylase levels in our saliva, our true and best cavity fighter, to the many sources of gasses and fluids passing through our mouths that aren’t good for our teeth. The GI tract at the mouth is generally a one way path down. Between GERD and the imbalance in the stomach, some toxic and occasionally infectious fumes vent through the mouth. Throw in all the lung infections, ENT infections, inhaled, sublingual and just swallowed medicines are not tooth friendly things and it is no wonder our teeth are under attack.
Malabsorption seems so impossible surrounded by an abundance of good foods, knowledge of nutrition and so forth. The terrible effects are hard to imagine as well. An old metric ascribed X number of years taken off a person’s life for each tooth lost. The point is poor teeth are a good reflection of poor health and the unpreventable malabsorption is doing far more damage elsewhere. My dentist suggested I use ACT restoring mouthwash to excess, it hardens the tooth enamel. I want to know what to take to restore all my bone loss. It is ok to mourn the loss of existing or potentially beautiful choppers. We display our health with them but more important, we express our joy with a big toothy smile. At least we should be able to.
LL