lost all my wisdom!😱

hello zesties🍋! my first post and it’s gonna be pretty lengthy😅 tried not to ramble on too much but when I was researching on wisdom teeth surgery, I couldn’t find anyone sharing their experience of extracting their wisdom teeth at national dental centre so I thought to share my experience w the timeline and estimated cost! writing this 3-4 weeks fresh after my surgery so hopefully it’s as detailed as possible, and can help anyone decide whether to go public or private for wisdom tooth / teeth surgery!

tldr: removed all 4 wisdom teeth at one go at national dental centre under the subsidized route

Okay so for context, I’ve 2 impacted bottom and 2 growing straight out top wisdom teeth, and the top wisdom teeth are longer than my top row teeth, which may affect my lower gums in the long run🥴

I’ve been procrastinating for 3 years since 2021 heh but since it didn’t hurt at all, I didn’t do anything about it! However, I started getting on off pain on my bottom left tooth about 1 year ago, and I’ve always brushed it off as an effect of my body being heaty? heheh

But mid-June 2024, I went to see a new dentist in jb for my annual scaling & polishing, and he was probably the 3rd/4th dentist in 3-4 years highlighting the presence of my wisdom teeth and asking me to consider removing my wisdom teeth, since all 4 were out, and they were not growing in the best direction. This jb dentist also kinda scared me with all the details about my molars possibly decaying since it’s hard to clean the area between my bottom wisdom teeth and the molars, and there were lots of food scraps trapped there. I’ve been told the younger you are, the faster your healing? and less painful the surgery will be?🤔

Sooooo, after tryna research more on wisdom teeth surgery (bcos i keep hearing how scary it is!!)

- End Jun: finally decided to stop procrastinating and book an appointment at polyclinic (bcos ima poor corporate slave tryna save money🥹and I heard polyclinic route is the cheapest! - okay maybe I have been dentist hopping and idk where to go or which dentist I should trust to do the surgery for me toooo🥲)

Within 1 working day of submitting the appointment request on healthbuddy, I managed to confirm an appointment at the polyclinic nearest to me for a week later! I tried all the polyclinics w dental near my place, but only the one nearest to me got back with an available slot!

(idk if it’s a tip, since I heard the queue for polyclinics are super long, I just put that all 4 of my wisdom teeth were in pain in the comments? since one of my tooth was kinda painful, and I got a slot quite instantly, and at the polyclinic nearest to the address I keyed into the appointment booking form)

- 5 Jul (Fri) : Managed to snag a slot, saw the dentist, got an xray and managed to get a referral letter! polyclinic told me to wait for National Dental Centre Singapore (NDCS) to contact me for an appointment.

- Being the impatient Singaporean I am, I didn’t want to wait, so with the referral letter I wanted to just make my own appointment via health buddy, but it didn’t seem to be working so I called NDCS. managed to get through to the call centre within 3mins (despite them saying there’s 3 people in queue! small wins🥳)

- They managed to give me an appointment for the next working day (I went poly on a Fri, and the next available appointment was on Monday so that’s rlly fast!! But I couldn’t make it so I booked Wed)

Tip!💡if you need to reschedule the appt given to you on health buddy and the appt slots don’t work for you, try calling the appt centre! they can help you find other slots with other docs, usually the reschedule slots on healthbuddy is only for the same doc so it’s super limited!

- 11 Jul (Wed): got an appointment at NDCS > consulted dental officer + consultant > confirmed I wanted to remove all 4 together under local anesthesia (could still decide on general anesthesia if I wanted). Had to wait for NDCS’ financial consultant to contact me the next working day to explain the fees and schedule surgery date

- 12 Jul (Fri): got a call from the financial consultant early in the morning (like 8am, the call woke me up🤭) and was informed the next slot for surgery is the following Monday (15 Jul) alr 😱 but I was going for a holiday in Aug so I scheduled it for Sept instead! and sistur was totally not ready for the op yet, needa mentally prep myself yknowwww. 4 teeth and I needa eat all I wanna eat first HAHAHAHA. I was rlly shocked at how efficient the whole process is, especially after hearing how bad the queues at public health institutions were!

- 9 Sep (Mon): finally scheduled for this day and my appointment was initially booked at 10am but literally one day before it got pushed back to 11am? I went at 10:30 to register and only got discharged ~1:30pm? the surgery+prep was supposedly only 1-1.5hrs but there was so many pple in queue, it became a waiting game😤 also waited super long to get my medssss

Thankfully I was blessed to be assigned a good surgeon (HAHHAHA okay but turns out the surgeon was someone I was acquainted with soooo I guess I felt assured I was in good hands!) all in all the process was quite smooth, just felt abit lost at times, especially aft the surgery cos the OT area felt very rushed? Like I think the entire dept was rushing off to an afternoon meeting and no one rlly explained the after care properly to me? Plus this was my first experience at NDCS and a wisdom tooth surgery soooo it was kinda nerve wrecking🥺

Pro tip💡: don’t book surgery on Mondays!! I overheard the nurses in the OT saying Mondays are their peak, unless you have a lot of time to kill

Will be sharing another post on the cost!! It was rlly super affordable compared to private dental!! 🫶🏼

Pros:

- cheaper, affordable with subsidies!!!

- experienced dental surgeons (or I would think so bcos they literally do many of these kind of surgeries a day?)

- quite fast process overall (from referral to surgery)

- clean and sterile environment! had to wear shoe covers and shower cap into the OT

- nurses are super friendly and helpful even tho they were pretty overworked🫶🏼experienced too!! I had some queries aft the op, I called them and they answered my qns easily and quickly!

Cons:

- cannot choose doctor (consult + surgery + follow up, I think you can try to request but it may not be fulfilled)

- waiting for everything!!! (Esp on actual surgery day, I waited until I wanted to sleep😴) like my appt was supposedly at 11am, arrived at 10:30am, waited until almost 12pm for the surgery??

- NDCS only opens Mon-Fri so if you work corporate Mon-Fri, then it might be hard to do the doc appointments

- have to walk over to the opposite building (Outram polyclinic) to get your meds after the surgery

Overall, would I choose public > private again?

MAYBE. If the appointment process was smoother! too many hiccups + trying to get the slots that fit your schedule are insane and abit too troublesome😵‍💫if just considering cost, then outright yes!

that’s it for now! stay tuned for the cost~👋🏼

National Dental Centre Singapore

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