Slab fractures

I was informed by one of my volunteers this morning that I have been rather negligent in my blogging lately. Luckily she told me this as I was about to start my dental surgery so I took pictures as I went along.

Recently, I had a dog come in for its yearly physical exam and vaccinations. I found that it had a slab fracture on its carnaissal tooth (if I'm going to use fancy dental charting - the 108 was fractured). It had occured long enough ago that the pulp was black. The thought of walking around with a tooth like this makes me want to cringe but our animals don't often tell us when they are having tooth problems.

Today was the day to take it out. I am holding the "slab" part of the tooth up. One thing you should never see is tissue between pieces of the same tooth. Yup, there is the infected tissue. Would you like to know what it smelled like? Nasty! There is a positive about a fracture like this, it exposes so much that it makes it incredibly easy to figure out where to do the drilling to isolate each of the three roots.

This is one of the three roots and all of them had granulomas on the root tip. Basically there were small abcesses on the tips. If you are having a hard time orienting yourself, the nasty tip is pointing to the left. The other thing that is missing from this root is length. The infection has eaten away at the tooth so it is now shorter. I won't bore you with how long I cleaned each of the sockets so I could feel comfortable about closing it properly. At least I know she will enjoy the pork liver flavored antibiotics!!!