Im a 31 year old female and i realize now, i am a freak of nature....

over the last week, pieces of calculus have been breaking off of my lower front teeth. i'm going for a regular cleaning in 3 weeks, due to my schedule at work and the dentist schedule, that was the earliest, april 14th.

my question is, why is the calculus breaking off? prior to this, i had a deep cleaning in june of 2004. before that, i had a huge amount of calculus that literally went down to my tongue and that broke off slowly over the course of 2 years before i finally went and had it removed.

i guess my concern is....how do i know that what's breaking off isn't part of my tooth too? what broke off yesterday looked like a pebble, was brownish-yellow in color. and when you look inside my mouth at the back of my front teeth, you can see where it broke off.

my other concern...it took years upon years of calculus building up before it started giving me problems. i never once went to a dentist ever in my life and my parents never told me to brush, so my entire life, a good 29 years, was with bad teeth. so, if it took 29 years of calculus build up to finally give me problems last year, why after just 9 months is it doing it again?

i really am scared. i feel more and more everyday like a freak of nature.

thanks for the help,
char

please, please, please....any help. i'm freaking out here about this. i called my dentist, but my appt on the 14th is the soonest. please, any advice, help, kind words. anything?

My guess would be that the calculus is just breaking off due to the regular action going on in your mouth. I'm sure it's alot easier to chip off from a small amount of calculus rather than a big dense ledge like you had. Some people build up calculus faster than others due to the mineral content in their saliva. The back of the lower front teeth usually build it up first and have the heaviest amount because of the salivary duct under the tongue. You aren't a freak of nature at all. 9 months is a long time to go between cleanings and a large amount of calculus can form in the meantime. Ideally, you should be going for cleanings every 3-4 months.