A dental implant is a replacement tooth that includes a titanium root implanted right into the bone. Getting one takes something like ten months and involves three surgeries plus some nonsurgical work. And I'm just about done with one.

First, they extract the old tooth, and pack the hole with a bone implant (which presumably comes from an individual who has no further need of bones.) They sew the gum shut. That has to grow for five or six months until the hole where the tooth used to be is solid bone. The extraction is actually the worst surgery.

Then, they put in the implant. It's a fairly complicated piece of engineered titanium. It's threaded on the outside and on the inside. They cut your gum open and the outside is screwed right into that new bone. The threads on the inside are initially just used to hold the implant onto a tool while it's being inserted. I believe it has some transverse holes in it too, although I'm not sure of that. They sew the gum shut again. After they implant it, the bone has to grow around it for three or four months. There's a danger that it won't take. If it doesn't they may not be able to try again.

By this point, you've been walking around without a tooth for eight months or more. You can get a little "denture" to fill the hole, or you can rough it like I did. My implant isn't one of my very front teeth so I don't look like a toothless redneck.

Finally, they'll X-ray the implant to see if it took. Mine did. Then they call you in for the "uncovering," which is what I had done today. They take a tool like a tiny apple corer and cut a nice little circle out of your gum, right over the implant. Remember those inner threads? Well, they take a shiny, tapered titanium post -- about the size of a button battery, but with a threaded rod protruding from one flat end -- and they screw it into those inner threads. The button thing sticks out. It's basically a shiny titanium tooth, and that's what I have now, for about a week.

If I grin sideways into the mirror, I look like a cyborg. It's actually very interesting, and it's made me think a lot about the kinds of things that would be possible, if not realistic. There's really nothing (other than medical ethics, I guess) to stop a real-life Dr. Evil from making a shark -- or a person -- with a laser implanted on their head, a prosthetic arm with a built-in buzzsaw, or, closer to home, razor-sharp metal teeth, all around.

After a week, a regular dentist can unscrew the button and make me a real-looking tooth to screw on there. Ten months and $3500, and I have a tooth again.

So boys and girls, the lesson is: take care of your teeth. I am embarrassed to say I lost mine clenching my jaw in anger until the thing cracked in half. Don't do that.

We have a distributed team so we have a simple "story database" based on text files in CVS. I finished story number 1337 yesterday and when I marked it "done", I noticed the number and thought for a minute about saying something about my h4><0r1ng pr0we55 in the commit message, but I decided it would be too geeky, so I didn't.

In my morning's email, I found that someone had replied to my boring CVS commit email for that story:

That was some really elite work on Story 1337.

So I needn't have worried about appearing too geeky, I suppose.