Keep on smiling, your teeth are healthy
I don’t know about you, but one of the parts of me that suffered the most was my mouth. During treatment I developed canker shores, and I lost my sense of smell and taste. I had this feeling that my mouth had been burnt with hot soup , and a quite heinous metal taste accompanied me for months. My gums were bleeding and sore, and I had an overall awful, painful sense all over my mouth. Since I had to worry about something and I wasn’t going to worry about dying, I thought it productive to worry about my mouth. Well, it turns out that chemo is very hard on your mouth, the lining, the teeth, and the gums. Whatever issues you have in your mouth, whether it is cavities, shores, sensitivity, dry mouth, it gets magnified by the treatment. I had just lost my hair, but I knew, well, they had assured me that, it would grow back. Now they tell me that chemotherapy is a great way to get gingivitis, and in some cases, with some treatments, you get advanced gingivitis (pyorrhea) Great, just what I needed, bold, depressed and now toothless! I went to see my dentist, likely a good friend of mine, and he told me that my cellular growth was too slow at the time to do any type of dental work, not even cleanings were safe: What is a girl to do? Worry. Well, that was just for a minute, I could not stay on that frame of mind for long, I would be crazy and toothless, not a good combination. As silly as I look, even I knew that teeth don’t grow back. I had to do something about them before I lost them all. I asked Antonio, my dentist, what I could do about my teeth to keep them healthy and he told me that I should keep them clean. And brush carefully, as regular tooth brushing can tear the gums and do more damage than good. Well, That was a joke, right? And not a funny one! I needed a solution. That I wanted one was more like it. My gums had started bleeding, and I knew that that was the beginning of the end. They hurt to touch and were very inflamed, so I took matters in to my own hands once again. I started asking around, and not even the old ladies in my hometown had a solution for me in this matter. Many of them being toothless themselves told me that loosing my teeth wasn’t such a big deal, now, loosing my hair: that should concern me more, LOL. I had to try something else, so I went to Internet, Google being my best friend by now, knew exactly what I needed. I searched “Natural ways of caring for teeth” and I got all kinds of answers back. My results were very encouraging and I started to practice some of them: Swishing with black or green tea seemed reasonable and easy enough: Rinsing with tea reduces plaque formation and the production of acids that cause tooth decay. Another ingredient in black tea, tannin (also found in grapes and certain herbs), has been shown to fight bacteria that cause decay. I tried it and somehow my mouth feel fresher, but my gums were still very tender, I didn’t get much relief from periodontal shores, so I kept on looking and on with the next experiment. Swishing with sea salt: It did help a lot, mostly with the canker shores and the gum swelling. It is both very disinfectant and calming for shore gums, I felt I was getting somewhere. -Brushing with Turmeric: Now that is a concept, and it works wonderful. I started using it as brushing powder, and my teeth started to feel wonderful immediately. After three days using it my gums stopped bleeding and in a week I they started looking pink again. I would go up and down with the gums because of the heavy treatment, but for the most part they kept my teeth on line. I really like the remedy, but my teeth are very porous, and although many people claim that it is a great whitener for teeth, I had real trouble cleaning the yellow stain, and I could not bear myself with yellow teeth on top of everything else. So finally I found a great solution that I use to this day: Oil pulling: is said to do a lot of things, there are a lot of claims out there that seem outrageous, and I am sure that some are, but as I always say, desperate times call for desperate measures, so I tried it also. It is said to be an ancient ayurvedic treatment, practiced for hundreds of years by some wise men and women. The basic idea is to swish your mouth for 15-20 minutes with oil. I started with virgin organic oil, 1 tbsp in the morning and another one at night, swishing for 20 minutes. I started to feel like if I had a normal mouth almost right away. No matter how hard the treatment was in the rest of my body, my mouth was feeling better everyday, unless I was feeling like crap and I forgot to swish or felt too tired to even think about my teeth. With time of use my teeth, which had become quite dark and yellowish from the treatment and the turmeric, started to look more like normal teeth, my gums got pink and my mouth wasn’t dry any more. After treatment my dentist told me that my mouth was in better health than before I started chemo. It sounded like a winner to me and I am still using it today in a daily basis. It will work for anybody that wants to keep a healthy mouth and easy yearly dentist visits. After reading more about oils, oil puling makes more sense: Oil is a natural disinfectant, and by swishing for 20 minutes you allow a lot more time for the oils to work their magic, staying on the mouth longer and pulling debris that stays between teeth. On top of that, oil has a viscose consistency, which makes it heavier than regular mouth wash, so it goes deeper in to the pockets created by gingivitis and gum disease, cleaning them and preventing the buildup of plaque in this hard to reach location: It works as deep-gum flossing. Controlling gingivitis also helps the rest of the body overall health: One of the biggest problems with gingivitis is that we are constantly swallowing bacteria and virii that live in our mouths, and in many cases the gastric acids are not able to destroy before they get sent to the small intestine and get distributed to the rest of our systems. If you search the net for more information, you will find that people use many kinds of different oils. What has worked for me is a solution 95/5 of sesame and tea tree oils. Give it a try if you need help with your teeth and let me know what you think about it.
Zensalicious 