I had all four wisdom teeth extracted in the same procedure under local anaesthetic, back in the medieval days of 1980s British NHS dentistry. The four deep injections were significantly more painful than the extractions and in fact led me to avoid dentistry in general.
However, many years later, I experienced excruciating tooth pain due to air pressure change [1] while flying to the US and then while subsequently driving through Yosemite. The pain was so bad at one point I had to stop driving and the prospect of the flight home was not fun. The cavity was exacerbated by my avoidance of dentistry following the wisdom teeth. The dental injection when I got home was nothing compared to the prior tooth pain so I started properly going to the dentist again. A root canal procedure several years later involved injections that were virtually pain free so I now don't stress about the prospect of an injection at all (except perhaps for the few seconds when the dentist is about to insert the needle).
For me, the change is due to 1) improvements in procedures and 2) a general lessening in personal squeamishness as I've got older. Any injection at all when I was younger had the potential to make me faint but now I can even watch the needle during a blood test or similar. YMMV.
Wisdom teeth spread their roots the older they get.
Basically the roots look like this at first || and after they get settled in, they're more like this: _/\_ and at that point getting them out WILL suck.
So if you have any family history of your wisdom teeth being f'd up, get them removed as soon as possible. My top two wisdom teeth were out before I even noticed the dentist was doing anything.
Then I got stupid and chickened out, waited too long, and the bottom ones were an hour each to dig out piece by piece. Not fun.
I had the opposite problem: they were still very low down when they started impacting the other teeth, and as a result they were still rooted in the cranial nerve. I had to wait longer for them to grow out further and impact even harder before I could get them taken out without high risk of facial paralysis. As it was I still lost feeling in one half of my tongue.
It was worse in the beginning, now it is more like the front-left 1/3 is numb. No, I don't really bite it. It made speaking in the beginning difficult, but I've learned how to work around it.
I've had two removed. One just popped out when pulled with the extraction tools, the other totally shattered, which then required an operation under general anaesthetic to be fully removed[1].
Of the remaining two, my top left one is fully 'through' but at a slight rearward facing angle. I don't know if that is normal or not. The other (my bottom left) is 99% still under the surface, and like another commenter just said, is sideways orientated with the top of the tooth facing the front of my jaw. What sucks about this tooth is that because it's slightly erupted I do get food caught between it and my rear molar so I have to be very thorough when cleaning. It doesn't move at all (it's been like this 20 years now) or hurt, so I just live with it.
Here in the UK simple tooth extractions tend to be done with just local anaesthesia via injection into the gum[2]; Only the more complicated removals end up in hospital as a general anaesthetic based operation done by a Ear-Nose-and-Throat specialist.
The pain only really hits once the anaesthetic wears off. Tooth pain is one of the worse kinds of pain I think. It only lasts a few days though as the mouth has an amazing ability to heal compared to other parts of the body.
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[1] I also had a largish mole on my brow removed as a freebie at the same time. Bonus!
I had the same thing. There is little to no pain in the extraction, at least there was not for me. My wisdom teeth were quite big so I was completely sedated for the procedure itself. Followed by a few days of ice packs, lots of gauze in my cheeks, and nothing but milkshakes for meals and I was back at school and happy as a clam.
Not GP, but I've had 4 removed and it wasn't painful (under local anaesthetics). Just really uncomfortable, especially when you hear and _feel_ the crunch of a tooth being uprooted.
All four in one go, procedure wasn't painful for me at all, but that might have something to do with it being under general anaesthetic. Of course, mouth was a bit painful for a few days.
Was it painful to remove wisdoms?