Yet more dental radiographs!

I recently had a large breed dog come in for his annual wellness exam and vaccinations. Lovely senior boy to work on. One of the first things I noticed when I looked in his mouth was that he was missing his 108 tooth. That is the big fat molar that is also known as the carnaissal tooth. All I could see were two exposed roots. We did bloodwork and scheduled dental surgery.

Here are the two roots we saw at the beginning of the dental surgery.

Here's our first radiograph showing the two roots with significant root loss from abscesses.

This is why we always want to check the area we have removed roots from. I had to go digging under the gum line to access this root. It was just hanging out like there wasn't a problem.

Here's the mouth once we were done. For those of you who read my blogs over breakfast, there is a minimal amount of blood for you to deal with!

Added this picture cause I think it is a pretty cool way to compare the two radiographs. Thank you Kelly, for making this happen.

Something so tiny........

I recently performed dental surgery on the cutest little cat. During her yearly physical, we found that Button (as in cute as a button), had fractured one of her incisors. Since the pulp was exposed we needed to extract it. It did turn out to be an eye opening procedure as we found something we weren't exactly expecting.

My RAHT, Kelly, took a great picture of the cavity on the canine tooth. The green arrow is pointing at the tiny little defect that was so painful that her mouth chattered when it was touched under the general anesthetic. If you've only read one of my dental blogs you know the next step was a radiograph.

This picture did not give me the warm fuzzies cause the root sucked! (Yes, that is a professional and medical term!) The picture on the right is from my dental book to show you what a normal root is supposed to look like. Needless to say, we extracted that tooth as well (after tracking Mom down at her dental appointment across town, LOL)!

Dental surgery = use the bloody dental radiograph machine!

I have given myself a couple of weeks before sitting down to write this particular blog; however, from the title, you may sense that I am still pretty frustrated. This whole thing could have been avoided and the dog would not have been in pain.
So here is a picture of the poor dog. It doesn't take much imagination to see there is a swelling on the side of its face. As well, the dog had ALREADY had dental surgery to remove tooth 208 (the big carnaissal tooth) to help with the swelling. Hmmmmmmmm. The owner had taken the dog back to the original vet concerned because the swelling hadn't gotten any better post-surgery. This person said it would take time to go down so the owner came to see me for a second opinion.

I was able to get a copy of the medical records and no where did it say that the dental radiograph machine had been used or that bloodwork had been performed on this senior dog. Needless to say, we did bloodwork (normal) and radiographs to see what was waiting for us as this tooth has three roots. Gee, that looks like a root to me! Brought out my drill and got it (and some pretty gross abcess material) out in short order.

The next radiograph showed..... the blue arrow pointing at the second root that was left behind (that means the vet only took out one root of three). The red arrow shows a tooth root abcess starting in the tooth in front so it had to be extracted as well.

After taking a final radiograph to make absolute sure there was nothing left, we sutured her up and let her have a well deserved, pain free nap!

So folks, should your dog or cat need to have dental surgery, make sure the facility has the ability to take radiographs so this sort of thing does not happen. Thank you for putting up with my rant!!!!