Fillings
If you don’t brush and floss your teeth every day, sugar bugs called cavities will start to eat away at your teeth. If a lot of your teeth was eaten away by the sugar bugs, the teeth can start to hurt and you’ll have a toothache. That’s why if we see sugar bugs during your cleaning, we want to take them out right away! We do that by doing a filling.
A filling is a very easy appointment. First we put some gel in your mouth that makes it feel funny. Then we pinch it a little bit with some sleepy juice, and that makes your lip feel fat, even though it’s really not. The sleepy juice puts your tooth to sleep, not you! It just makes sure that your teeth are comfy when we take out the sugar bugs. If you are still feeling a little nervous, we can also use laughing gas to make the nervousness go away. Laughing gas is air that you breathe through your nose that makes you feel really relaxed.
After the sleepy juice, we do the following steps to wash the sugar bugs away.
1. Sugar bugs don’t like water AT ALL! So we spray lots of water in your mouth that takes away the sugar bugs, and Mr. Thirsty sucks up all the water until it’s gone. Now all the sugar bugs are gone!
2. Then we paint on some sticky stuff that sticks to the tooth and we use a light to dry it.
3. We then cover your tooth with a white filling, a soft material that turns hard when we put the light on it. This returns your tooth back to how it was before!
4. Lastly, we will polish (or smooth out) your new filling, and spray lots of water again, just to make sure no more sugar bugs are around!
Now your tooth is like brand new! It’s as if you never had sugar bugs at all. But remember, we don’t want sugar bugs next time so you can join our No Cavity Club. To avoid sugar bugs, brush and floss your teeth every day after you eat. It’s good to ask help from mom and dad or have them check what you did, to make sure your teeth are clean and sparkly.