Jacqueline’s case study
Dental implants help transform Wild West fan’s smile
As a ten-year-old, Jacqueline Turgoose admits she was a bit of a tomboy with not a care in the world. But an incident with a cricket bat in a feisty game of rounders and subsequent trips to the “horrible” school dentist appeared to change things forever.
Brought up on the outskirts of the market town of Wetherby, money was tight and her family couldn’t afford a proper rounders bat.
“So we used a cricket bat and I got too close to it and as it came back was hit in the mouth. I remember it well,” she recalls.
School dentist problems
The game where she played backstop and lost a front tooth is etched into her childhood memories. “I had to go to the school dentist and he was horrible. I was just ten with a single tooth on a plate. It was so big you could tell it was false and it just didn’t fit,” says Jacqueline.
With the false tooth standing proud in her mouth she quickly became a target for bullying, though would-be tormentors soon met their match. “I was a toughie and having none of it,” she recalls.
The cruel, verbal harassment “didn’t last long” but the ill-fitting prosthetic was silently wreaking havoc in her mouth and her native teeth had become mobile and a lifetime’s trouble began.
By the time she left school at 15 and started work as a waitress, aggressive gingivitis (gum disease) had set in and she’d lost the whole of her upper arch of teeth.
“The dentures still never fitted well. I could never eat an apple without cutting it up, meat was always hard to chew and when I laughed I instinctively put my hand in front of my mouth.
“I also lost bottom teeth and hated going to the dentist. Truth is I was scared. The [false] teeth moved all the time and I’d go nowhere without the adhesive to stick them back in place,” she says.
“If I went out for a meal – I eventually gave up going out to restaurants – I’d have to get up from the table two or three times to go to the ladies to replace the glue. It was that bad.
“If my husband wanted to go out for something to eat, I’d say ‘let’s stay at home and I’ll cook something nice’,” she says.
A youthful 70-something-year-old, Jacqueline, an avid Westerners’ re-enactment fan, has finally resolved the life-long problems that compromised spontaneity, diet and her smile.
Newspaper article the catalyst
Five years ago she read an article in her local newspaper about the work of Steven Burchell Dip CDT RCS(Eng) GDC108353, principal of North Street Dental.
The article focussed on stabilising dentures with implants. “It offered me hope that something could be done to help and I kept the article all this time until I had the money to get my teeth fixed,” she recalls.
Husband John adds: “It was a good decision and worth every penny.”
After an initial consultation with Steven, an appointment was made with practice implant dentist Dr Owain Rees BDS, DGDP (UK) Dip Imp Dent (UCL) GDC 61575.
Traditional, high-quality upper dentures were prescribed along with a removable lower over-denture, stabilised on two implants.
The results have been transforming. “They are the best teeth I’ve had in the whole of my life. The lower teeth are clicked on to the implants and the top fit perfectly,” says Jacqueline.
Free from her denture adhesive, Jacqueline celebrated having her new teeth with a restaurant meal. “I had steak,” she recalls. Her experience with the clinic? “Every member of staff was lovely. They were all so very kind,” she adds.
And Jacqueline’s teeth? “When I first saw them I cried, they were just so natural looking and I can eat anything now.”
Jacqueline after her treatment at North Street Dental
