The Life of NHL Dentists
About 6 months ago I caught a full-swing of a stick to the right side of my mouth&#x2F;jaw. Cracked my front right tooth in half and broke the next two right-most teeth at the gum-line, and cracked one of my lower teeth off at the top 1&#x2F;4. Neither top teeth broken at the gum could be saved&#x2F;or built up so they pulled them. I also had one of my lower teeth, left of center knocked out (yes left of center, I think the top portion of the stick blade came down and slapped that part of my mouth). I picked that one up and washed it off and stuck it back in; it seems to have re-rooted.<p>The work they did on the top teeth was pretty much the most painful, least fun medical I&#x27;ve ever had to go through. Pulling those two top teeth that were broke off at the gum-line was extremely unpleasant. At one point the dentist had to put her knee on the chair&#x2F;left side of my ribs to get enough leverage to pull one of the two. My wife couldn&#x27;t even watch and said it was like a scene from a movie.<p>This is after playing hockey since the age of 6 (I&#x27;m 52) and not wearing a cage for roughly 30 years (since I stopped playing in college).<p>I had a very strange desire to buy&#x2F;put on a full cage a few weeks before this happened and even started to research which to buy but got interrupted and lost my traction on the whole idea.<p>To date this has run me over 10k and I still have to get my final implants.<p>And yes I do wear a cage now, and it&#x27;s crazy how often I catch a stick&#x2F;puck to the face now. I guess I used up all my karma and was getting lucky for years. I attribute this &#x27;luck&#x27; mostly to playing with other ex-college and pro players whom generally know how to keep their stick down and in control.<p>Incidentally the person that hit me was a female defense-men in a co-ed league; she&#x27;d played high level college and was groomed for the women&#x27;s Olympic team on one point, so I don&#x27;t fault her, it was a freak accident mostly caused by her being tiny (just over 5ft on skates); if she was an average sized guy out there the stick would have hit me in the half-shield or top of the helmet.<p>Either way, yeah cage on now and I regret not making the transition sooner.<p>Also - I give USA Hockey Organization high marks, they have so far covered about 90% of the costs and were easy to deal with. I actually lost my previous job because of all this, I also sustained a concussion (and a partially fractured jaw), and they were not very sympathetic to my drop in production so the coverage from USA Hockey has been a huge positive in all this.