Diane talks about Preparing for Dentures

What information were you given?

With hindsight I would have gone and investigated a bit more and found out some more information but actually there wasn’t that much information. I didn’t know where to look and nobody told me where to look so I didn’t look.

How did you feel before the fitting?

It was horror of the pain. I didn’t want to go through the pain of having my tooth out because I do find it quite stressful, painful going to the dentist anyway. The thought of having yet another foreign body in my mouth and I think when I first had them done, when I had the first two put in I started lisping and I’d always been told that people who have got false teeth, the clue is that they lisp and so I tried really hard to annunciate my words and be far more articulate so that people didn’t guess because I didn’t want anybody to know.

Who did you turn to for support?

It would have been much nicer to have been able to talk to somebody who had been through it. I mean yes I talked to my mother and my father but they were much older and were more of the age that I associate with, you know, having dentures so it wasn’t quite the same. I think you need to talk to your contemporaries, people who are the same age and at the same stage of life as well.

Did you take time off work for the fitting?

Because my job involved doing presentations, you know, or partly it involved doing presentations so I just didn’t feel that I could go and do my job with two teeth missing in the front of my mouth you know, it would have been awful! So I made sure that I took time off in between them coming out and being fitted.