After dental implant surgery

The first 24 hours

• Bite gently on the gauze until any oozing settles. A little pink in your saliva on the first night is normal.
• Do not rinse, spit or use a straw today, and do not smoke. The site needs to be left alone to form a clot and settle.
• Cold on the cheek, 15 minutes on and 15 minutes off while you are awake.
• Take pain relief before the numbness wears off, then follow the packet. Ask a pharmacist if you take other medicines.
• Eat soft and cool once the numbness has gone, chewing well away from the site.
• Head up, and no exercise. Rest with an extra pillow, and skip alcohol for the day.
• Take any antibiotics exactly as prescribed and finish the course unless your dentist or doctor says otherwise.
• If you had sedation, someone must take you home, and you must not drive, work or sign anything for the rest of the day. How sedation works here.

The first week

Swelling builds into day two or three, which catches people out because it feels like going backwards. From there it turns and each day is better. Bruising can track down the cheek or jaw as it resolves.

• Warm salty rinses from the day after, held and tipped gently rather than swished.
• Keep brushing your other teeth normally. Around the site, do exactly what your dentist told you and no more.
• Chew on the other side and keep hard, crunchy and seedy food away from the area.
• Wear the temporary only as instructed. If a denture is rubbing, stop wearing it and ring us rather than putting up with it.
• Stay off cigarettes as long as you can manage. Smoking affects healing around an implant more than almost anything else you control.

What about the months in between?

Once the first week is behind you the site usually stops bothering you, and the long phase begins: the bone growing onto the implant. It asks almost nothing of you, which is its own trap, because it is easy to treat a comfortable implant as a finished one.

Two things matter through this stretch. Keep the area clean, because gum inflammation around a healing implant is the thing most likely to cost you. And do not chew on it until your dentist says the final tooth can go on. An implant that is loaded before it has integrated with the bone can fail, and that is a preventable failure rather than bad luck.

What can you eat?

For the first couple of days: yoghurt, smooth soup once cooled, scrambled egg, mashed vegetables, pasta, anything that needs little chewing. Eat with a spoon, not through a straw. Then build back towards normal food as comfort allows, keeping the hard work on the other side until the final tooth is fitted.

Avoid small hard pieces that can lodge near the site, such as seeds, nuts and popcorn, until things have closed over.

How do you keep an implant healthy long term?

An implant cannot get a cavity, which is the reassuring half of the story. The other half is that the gum and bone holding it can be lost the same way they are lost around a natural tooth, and it tends to happen without pain. That condition is called peri-implantitis, and it is the main reason implants fail years later rather than months.

What prevents it is ordinary: clean around and under the implant every day with whatever your dentist showed you, and keep your check-ups so the gum, the bone level and the fit can be checked. Tell us if the gum around it bleeds when you clean, the way our page on bleeding gums describes. Around an implant that is a signal worth acting on early.

What happens at the follow-up?

We check the site is healing, remove any stitches that need it, and confirm the implant is stable before anything is made to go on top. If you are unsure whether what you have is normal, that visit is the place to ask, and you do not have to wait for it: ring Y3 Smiles Dental in the meantime. For the appointments themselves, see what happens on the day, and dental implants for the options and the risks.