Imagine lying back for a routine root canal only to have your teeth ‘shaved off’ and replaced with veneers.
That’s what happened to Caitlyn Weld in Florida when she was a baby-faced student fresh from Tennessee.
You’d never guess from looking at the rows or even, white teeth. But ‘they’re not real’, she said in a TikTok posted this month.
When Caitlyn was just 18, she found herself in the unenviable position of finding a new dentist in a new state.
It’s a terrifying enough situation without the need to a undergo your first ever root canal, even if your family back home is footing the bill.
Caitlyn, now 22, said: ‘I was scared, so I asked the lady as we were in the room “what does a root canal feel like? Is it going to hurt, can you explain to me the procedure?”
‘But she didn’t speak very well English [sic] so I never really found out.’
Then the shaving started.
‘I didn’t have a mirror during the whole thing so I couldn’t see what was going on’, Caitlyn said in the video.
She only became aware of what was happening when a mirror was held up to her face and she was asked to pick a shade for the veneers.
But the view of stubs where her teeth had been was too much for Caitlyn, who had her friend pick the shade while she processed the loss.
A video of Caitlyn reacting to her gummy mouth has now been watched more than 20million times.
‘They told me that the severity of the hole in one of my teeth, the one I got the root canal done, was so bad that they took precautions to just prevent it from happening in any of my teeth.
‘[The dentist said] girls my age normally want all their teeth that show to be the same color and they didn’t want one color to be brighter than the rest of them and they also told me for safety of my teeth.
‘I was just like “okay,” I was dumb, I was 18, I had no idea about teeth nothing so I just went along with it. They made it sound necessary, we didn’t know any different.’
There’s a pretty hefty price difference between a root canal and veneers.
A root canal costs around $1,000 per tooth in the US, while a veneer costs roughly four times that. It could cost $40,000 for a full front set of veneers.
But cost wasn’t even the most immediate concern.
‘The procedure should be painless and no more unpleasant than having a filling’, the NHS website says of root canals, a usually successful procedure rarely requires extraction.
Veneers, on the other hand, are excruciating.
In Caitlyn’s case, she had temporary veneers so uneven they had to be filed down so she could eat.
She said: ‘I remember when they took off the temporary ones and the air hitting whatever the heck was left was probably the worst pain I’ve ever seen.’
The dentists’ argument was convincing enough at the time that Caitlyn didn’t consider suing the dentist for giving her veneers against her will.
Now three years on. Caitlyn can share the experience as a funny story without needing to expose the dentist who did it.
‘These are my teeth now, they really don’t look too much different than the previous teeth.
‘I feel like they are a little bit longer, I also bite my gums really bad when I’m chewing which I never used to really do.’
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