I hope none of you get too squeamish about this post. Anyways, after I got my tooth extracted, I asked my dentist if I could take the tooth home with me. He said yes but gave me strict instructions to disinfect the tooth first and to not touch the tooth with my barehands before it had been sanitized.

After a half day dip into isopropyl alchol and a thorough cleaning, I was able to take pics of the tooth. My camera's macro mode isn't the best so the images didn't come out too clean except for one which was pretty good.

So in all the pics, the colour is really off. The exposed enamel looks it's this dark shade of gray. In reality, the enamel is actually quite white in colour. The roots themselves are actually this light manilla colour. The first pic shows two roots that were in pretty good shape, which my dentist said made it a shame since it was only one root that was problematic. What you don't see is this pulpy, fibrous crap that was stuck in between all three roots. I heard my dentist say it was part of the abscess that had formed because of the infection. It took a bit of work to tear that fibrous stuff out of there. As I was cleaning, I was thinking, man, my body made that stuff in there.

The second pic shows the "root" of the problem. There's the root that went really bad. It's as black as the pic shows, there's no colour problem in that image. I was pretty amazed when I saw it for the first time. That thing had been stuck in my jaw for a few years, getting a shade darker as time marched on. Notice that the tip of black root has been cut off. My dentist wanted to see if his root canal had been as good as he wanted it. Indeed it was, it went as deep as it should have been. Also notice the bits of pulpy tissue that I couldn't clean off. That stuff is stuck on there tightly. You'd need like a nail file or something to get all that off.

The third pic shows the top of the tooth. The improper colour makes it look like my dentist had filled in my root canal with tar. In fact, the filling is very white in colour.

The last pic, though fuzzy, shows all three roots of the tooth. Again, notice the cut off tip of the black root. You can see the material that my dentist used to fill in that root canal.

Thanks for reading and sharing in my extraction experience!

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