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[WHOAguitarninja]

Getting your wisdom teeth out is not that big of a deal. I was never really in any pain. The hour or so after you wake up is quite fun. If i remember correctly, right after I came to, I asked the nurse why she had 4 eyes, then sang more theme songs from movies than I realized I knew on the way home.

The absolute worst thing about it for me is that it leaves these annoying craters in the back of your jaw for months that food just LOVES to get stuck in. I remember having to go back there with tweezers every night and get the food lodged in there out.

Aside from that, nothing too bad. Slightly swollen cheeks for awhile, a little sore for awhile, but nothing terribly major.

 

[Hitokage]

As I was saying.

 

[Red Scarlet]

The pain was off and on for me too, then it became absolutely unbearable. I took 14 Aleve in a 2-hour span the day before they got pulled. Just because the pain goes away for a few days/couple of weeks does not mean that there will be no more pain again.

Go to the dentist and have him/her take a look.

 

[EdLuva]

Getting your wisdom teeth out is not that big of a deal. I was never really in any pain. The hour or so after you wake up is quite fun. If i remember correctly, right after I came to, I asked the nurse why she had 4 eyes, then sang more theme songs from movies than I realized I knew on the way home.

The absolute worst thing about it for me is that it leaves these annoying craters in the back of your jaw for months that food just LOVES to get stuck in. I remember having to go back there with tweezers every night and get the food lodged in there out.

Aside from that, nothing too bad. Slightly swollen cheeks for awhile, a little sore for awhile, but nothing terribly major.

This is the experience I had when I got all 4 of my wisdom teeth taken out, except for the 4-eyed nurse and happy songs (about 2 months ago, BTW, I'm 33). I had an IV in the back of my hand and sleeping gas (whatever it's called). They told me to count to 5. I got to 3, they said "Goodnight", and I was out. I woke up an hour later with a swollen mouth and no pain, just bleeding. The annoying part is getting food caught in the craters in your mouth. I had to use a special syringe to get the food out. Great for getting leftovers.

There was some pain a week later though.

 

[aoi tsuki]

i wasn't put under, but the lydocaine did the job pretty well. The worst part was hours after the removal. The taste of blood was inescapable. i was drinking a Minute Maid orange soda a few hours afterwards, and after i got about a third into the can, i realized i was drinking blood. i spat out the drink i had in my mouth, and it was blood red. i just knew i'd bleed to death through my mouth considering how much blood was leaking through my gums. The first day continued to be hell, especially in the later hours leading into the early hours of the first day. The taste of stale blood, especially when you wake up, is especially horrific.

 

[Crazymoogle]

The absolute worst thing about it for me is that it leaves these annoying craters in the back of your jaw for months that food just LOVES to get stuck in. I remember having to go back there with tweezers every night and get the food lodged in there out.

All you guys going for the gas, heh. I took it like a man. 1 needle and 3 hours of waiting around! (okay, my dentist was the cool kind that had a PS2 setup for me to play during it.)

Anyhow, of the four pulls, two were simple extractions and the craters actually clamped together themselves within 24hrs. The other two were basically painful enough to miss a week and I still had to go back to get the stitches out.

 

[VALIS]

18? 20? 27?!?!

Am I the only person here that got his out at 13?

32 (33 in a few weeks) and just got my first one out on Monday. The tooth was deteriorating, I thought it would be a real complex and painful procedure, turned out to be a piece of cake. Novocaine, pliers and out it came in about 60 seconds.

Haven't had headaches since Monday... until today. For some strange reason I've had ripping headaches all day and my teeth have been extremely sensitive. Suck.

 

[Late Stage Marxist]

I'm 23 and my x-rays tell me that I have 4 wisdom teeth, but only 1 has come in. I had some pain and headaches when it first came in, but it's been fine for a while (knock on wood). I should probably book an appointment one of these days to get the suckers torn out, but I don't have dental coverage at the moment, and fuck if I'm spending my hard earned money on that shit! :lol

 

[Fix]

Had mine out 10 years ago at 18. Got the gas and the needle and all, but the juice wasn't working. They hooked me up to an IV after giving me a local and told me to count down from 30. I finished, but was still awake. The dentist came around, tapping the IV bag and all, asking his assistants to make sure I'd gotten the right stuff. For some reason the juice didn't knock me out. So they gave me a couple more shots and got to work. Just do it. The removal of the wisdom teeth is what separates the american smile from the british.

 

[Pudding Tame]

My experience was pretty horrific, 3rd molars growing in sideways. Couldn't pull them whole so they had to break them up peice by piece. No gas or anything that would put me out. Just a local anesthetic that felt like it lasted only fifteen minutes a shot. Nothing like being awake for someone drilling and hammering away in your jaw. The sounds and smells are indescribable. And the coup de grace was when they finaly broke a piece the be extrcted, the dentist had to put his knee on my chest so he could get leverege to pull the piece out. In addition to the pain and the medication afterwards, my chest for weeks looked and felt like it was filled with styrofoam peanuts from the bruises from all the times the dentist put his knee there.

 

[OpinionatedCyborg]

I guess I'm lucky my wisdom teeth came in parallel to my jaw, and had to be removed before they forced all my teeth our of order. The surgeon cut away the gums, sucked up the blood, then chipped away at the teeth until he could get his tool on them and rip them out. The most pain you feel, if any, is in your jaw, but your mouth itself is invincible.

Wait, that's the exact same procedure you guys are bitching about. Boo hoo. Bedridden from a tooth extraction? Suck it up, bitch. Your surgeons must've sucked or you msut've had mutant teeth. Maybe you guys experienced the pain because you had all of your teeth removed at once, as opposed to my dentists decision to send me to the surgeon on two seperate occasions. She thought the complexity of the proecedure (took around 1 hour for 2) meant that it'd hurt a lot. Were you guys put on codeine afterwards? I was supposed to take it 3 times a day, but skipped once or twice, and didn't notice any pain.

The worst thing about the procedure is the nasty taste you have in your mouth for days. It's not the blood that sours even the sweetest of sodas, but bits and pieces of your tissue flaking off (I think).

 

[AniHawk]

I remember when I got my wisdom teeth pulled. The afterwards part is a little fun depending how you react to the medication.

Bad thing was afterwards, the crater in the back of my mouth didn't heal properly, so for about two weeks I had raw bone showing. I had to go in and get it fixed. Hurt like hell.

 

[OpinionatedCyborg]

Since I was camping and drinking shortly after my second tooth exraction, the incision didn't heal properly, and I ended up having a big, probably infected bump right where the stiches were. I also had a bad habit of poking that bump with my tongue to get a tiny tinge of pain. Maybe I'm a masochist.

 

[Jeffahn]

I had some X-rays done back in South Africa and the dentist told me that the wisdoms were decending and there was enough space for them. Two of brother's have had to have their's out, but it like like I'll miss that boat. The only real problems I've had is that one of them is decending out of line and pushing my front teeth a bit out of wack. Also, they tend to make it more difficiult to remove all the food particles that become odeged back there, so I have to spend more time brushing.

...

 

[Tunesmith]

Had all mine developed roughly four years ago, age 17. Still got them all, have never had any problems whatsoever, never had any holes at all either.
*knock on wood*

 

[Jill Sandwich]

Dang, I need to book an appointment to having a rotten tooth out soon. This thread doesn't give me much confidence.

 

[gblues]

Don't let these guys scare you. The relative pain of having the tooth pulled is minor compared to the utter hell of a rotted out tooth. Been there, done that.

Nathan

 

[Baron Aloha]

I won't ever have to worry about wisdom teeth. I've had xrays done and I don't have any.

 

[Jill Sandwich]

Tell me more about what will happen if i don't get it pulled. At the moment, there's a foul tasting juice that seeps out if I suck my back molar...

I concur, that is a crap do not link placeholder. I'm keeping it as an example

 

[Ruzbeh]

Tell me more about what will happen if i don't get it pulled. At the moment, there's a foul tasting juice that seeps out if I suck my back molar...

Omfg. That's easily the most retarded "Do not hotlink" image I have ever seen.

 

[CrunchyB]

Why do we call them wisdom teeth anyway? Does the Dalai Lama have like 20 of them?

It's probably derived from Dutch.

In Dutch they're call "verstandskiezen" which could be interpreted/translated as "wisdom molars". But in reality it's a bastardized form of "ver staande kiezen" which means something like "distant molars".

edit:
Looked it up, I was wrong, it's just a weird coincidence
Slayn's explanation was on the mark. They were called wisdom tooth in Latin already, dens sapientiae, probably because they appear after puberty.

 

[cloudwalking]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_teeth

Wikipedia has a good page on wisdom teeth.

Apparently wisdom teeth are a "vestigial" trait that're disappearing with evolution. Yay!

I always heard that the point of them was because back in the old days, by the time they grew in, it was pretty standard for people to have lost a tooth (or teeth) because it rotted.

 

[teh_pwn]

From that link, the people that don't believe in evolution argue:

Others argue that recent changes to softer diets which cause less wear on the teeth may be causing the third molars to be less useful, and problematic in many humans.

I don't get it. Some people don't have them because of a change in diet over time has led to them being useless so the human race is beginning to get rid of them. Is that not evolution?