As a child in school I had a serious dental accident. It happened during a physical education class. We were playing a game with two teams which took place inside a large empty room with a wood floor. The sides of the room were lined with old theatre chairs linked together at their feet by wooden planks. Two teams at opposite ends of the hall would line up across the room. Then the teams would run forward en mass, meeting in the middle of the room. Each team would try to keep members of the other team from proceeding past them to the far end of the room. A certain amount of wrestling was involved to stop the other team members. Sometimes a person would be grabbed around the legs and team members would be hauled down to the floor. The team that had the most members who made it to the far end of the room won.

During one of these scuffles I had moved quite close to the edge of the room where the chairs were. I fell hard hitting the floor. My mouth hit the wood of the floor and perhaps part of the board at the foot of one the chairs. The impact caused one of my front upper teeth to break out of my mouth. The tooth snapped in half but the upper part was still attached by a piece of skin. There was quite a bit of blood coming out of that hole in my mouth.

Luckily there was a Red Cross outpost hospital close to the school and I was taken there for treatment. The bleeding was stopped and they had me lie down because I was feeling faint. The nurse telephoned a dentist in the nearest town to make an emergency appointment as well as my parents, to give them details of my accident. She also explained the treatment to take place at the dentist's office.

The trip to the dentist took a couple of hours, over a winding mountainous road. At the dentist's office my tooth was shoved back into my jaw and the dentist wired it into place in my mouth. The hope was that it would become a useful tooth again. However, the tooth died in a few days and I had to return to the dentist for more treatments, including a root canal filling on the dead tooth. Even with freezing this procedure hurts.

The dentist did some reconstruction to the tooth. A synthetic appliance was added to the bottom of the broken tooth which made it look and act like a normal front tooth.

It has been over thirty years since that dental work was done. The tooth is still in my mouth. It works like a normal living tooth. Sometimes it feels a little tight in my upper jaw but I have had no serious problems with it.

Michael Russell Your Independent Dental guide