Pericoronitis

Pericoronitis can develop when wisdom teeth only partially erupt (break through the gum). This allows an opening for bacteria to enter around the tooth and cause an infection. In cases of pericoronitis, food or plaque (a bacterial film that remains on teeth after eating) may get caught underneath a flap of gum around the tooth. If it remains there, it can irritate the gum and lead to pericoronitis. If the pericoronitis is severe, the swelling and infection may extend beyond the jaw to the cheeks and neck.¹

No, I’ve never heard of it before either. But that’s what I was diagnosed with after my emergency dentist appointment this morning. It’s about as fun as it sounds cause man, it hurts like hell. Thank God my dentist used numbing stuff² on my gums when he scraped out whatever was trapped between my wisdom tooth and the overlapping gum or else the pain would’ve been a million times worse!

I’ve never had any trouble with my wisdom teeth up until now. I’m really lucky (or perhaps I just have excellent genes) cause I have enough space along my jaw for my wisdom teeth and aside from this brush with pericoronitis, they’ve never given me any trouble. Once I kick my case of pericoronitis to the curb, I’m going to look at possibly trimming the part of my gum that overlaps my wisdom tooth³ so that I won’t ever suffer from pericoronitis again. As painful as trimming the gum sounds, it is a lot less drastic (and less expensive!) than taking my wisdom tooth out altogether!

Listerine and warm salt water rinses are going to become my best friends in the next few days and hopefully the pain should be completely gone by the end of the week. Moral of the story: don’t eat popcorn, as that’s what got me into this mess in the first place.

1. Source: WebMD. [↩]
2. It smelled like cherry, which I was very excited about. However, it did NOT taste like cherry at all! [↩]
3. Only my bottom two wisdom teeth have slight overlap on the back outer corner of the tooth with my gum, my top two are completely in. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.