Bad News!

So last week I got some rather bad news. I was having some mild tooth pain early in the week that turned into wicked pain by mid week. So, I broke down and went to the dentist. After a quick xray and and exam the dentist gives me the news. The tooth needs to come out. No big deal right. People have teeth pulled everyday. Well, not exactly. This tooth has a fracture above the gumline, so its not going to come out in one piece. Also the fractured root has caused major bone loss in the area around the tooth. So what this means for me is that I now have to go to an oral surgeon to have my face ripped apart.

It will start with extracting the tooth. Which will suck. Next, they will peel back my upper gums and drill, chisel and scrape away the bad bone in the area. Then, hopefully they will put my face back together for a while. Well, not really, I will have a gaping hole where the tooth and bone used to be, not to mention that the gum line will hike up after surgery and even with a temporary fake tooth I will look pretty funny. So, that's step one. I will have to walk around with this fake tooth and a massive hole in my face for any where from 3 to nine months depending on how it heals.

Next, after the three months or so, I go back to have a bone graft done to fill in the gaping hole in my face. This will really suck. They will harvest bone form the back part of my jaw and screw it in place the fill the opening where my tooth used to be. Now that will have to heal for about three months or so.

Now, about six months after the initial extraction they may be able to install the titanium screw that will be teh support for my soon to be new tooth. After this is in place it also needs to heal for up to three months. Then, nine to twelve months later, they can begin building my new tooth around the screw.

So, the bigger issue here is training. I am pretty scared that this is going to derail my Ironman tarining for Zurich. I won't know until after the surgery next week what my recovery time will be, and what the expected scheduel for the rest of the procedures will be. After talking to the dentist, he thinks that the recovery is going to suck, many days of not eating solid foods, with no activity, with lots of pain killers. So, I am in the process of coming up with an alternative plan for my training. It may be that I will only be trying to finish my first ironman rather than having a time to shoot for. I really don't like that at all. I wanted to go there feeling ready to race, not just wondering if I will have done enough to finish.