Imagine going in for a routine root canal only to have your teeth “shaved” and replaced with veneers.
This is what happened to Caitlyn Weld Florida when she was a baby-faced schoolgirl from Tennessee.
You’d never guess by looking at the rows of even, white teeth. But “they’re not real,” he said in a TikTok post this month.
When Caitlyn was just 18 years old, she found herself in the incredible position of finding a new dentist in a new state.
It’s a scary enough situation without having to undergo your first 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 ‘how does a root canal feel?’ It will hurt, can you explain the procedure to me?’
“But he didn’t speak English very well [sic] so I never found out.”
Then the shaving began.
“I didn’t have a mirror the whole time, so I couldn’t see what was going on,” Caitlyn said in the video.
She only realized what was happening when a mirror was held up to her face and she was asked to choose a shade for the veneers.
But the sight of the stems where her teeth used to be was too much for Caitlyn, who had her friend choose shade while she processed the loss.
A video of Caitlyn reacting to her mouth has been viewed over 20 million times.
“I was told that the severity of the hole in one of my teeth, the one I had the root canal done, was so bad that they took precautions to prevent it from happening to any of my teeth.
‘[The dentist said] girls my age normally want all their teeth to appear to be the same color and they didn’t want one color to be brighter than the rest and they also told me about the safety of my teeth.
I was like “okay”, I was dumb, I was 18, I had no idea about teeth anything, so I went ahead with it. They made it sound necessary, we didn’t know any different.’
There is quite a price difference between a root canal and veneers.
A root canal costs about $1,000 per tooth at US, while a veneer costs about four times as much. It could cost $40,000 for a full front veneer set.
But cost wasn’t even the most immediate concern.
“The procedure should be painless and no more unpleasant than sealing,” the NHS website says for 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.
He said: “I remember when they took the temps out and the wind blowing what the hell 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 later. Caitlyn can share the experience as a funny story without having to expose the dentist who did it.
“These are my teeth now, they really don’t look much different from the previous teeth.
“I feel like they’re a bit longer, I also bite my gums really bad when I chew, which I’ve never really done.”
Contact our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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