Dental Assurance-Seeking Backfired - Please Help

[Veryscary 11]

I have a major oral c word fixation that is destroying me. I went to a dentist yesterday to tamp it down and it backfired and now I’m spiraling.

I felt the roof of my mouth and thought it felt weird, then I looked and was convinced something was wrong. I flipped and went to the dentist. He told me he didn’t see anything unusual, I kept prodding, and he reiterated there was jut normal ruggae. He also said that they can look whitish sometimes if tey’ve ben roughed up and he asked if I smoked; I said I vaped. He said that can do it. I freaked out because to me, white=leukoplakia=pre-malignant. He said he shouldn’t say whitish but “less pink”. But it was too late. So now I can’t accept that he didn’t think anything was wrong with my mouth or that anything needed to be monitored or biopsied in any way even though that’s what he said.

I keep thinking “But why did he said whitish? Doesn’t that mean…”I also have a lot of dental work that has to be done and I’m afraid when I go back, my normal dentist will see something wrong. I had a complete breakdown yesterday in front of my partner.

On background: I started vaping 1.5 years ago to curb an occasional clove cigar craving. Now I vape way more than I ever smoked and this has sent my anxiety through the roof. I’ve been visiting dentists at least once a month, sometimes twice, for a year. The last time, March 11, I saw a dentist AND an oral surgeon AND had that blue vizilite thing. Seven weeks later, I think something must have changed and now there’s OC.

I know there are a lot of cognitive errors going on here, and I’m fully aware that even in the heaviest actual cigarette smokers, 18 months is not enough time to think you would have c word. But I’m stuck.

Lately life is really just unbearable.

 

* Please no anti-vaping/smoking lecture. I already know I need to stop vaping if only to stop this trigger.*

[MARC 431]

If you had oral cancer, the dentist would have picked it up during the examination. 

[Bobnnat 496]

Also, oral cancer on the roof of the mouth (hard palate) is very rare in the western world. Almost all cases are found in people who practice what is called reverse smoking where they literally smoke a cigarette from the lit end. There are other similar practices which are fairly common in the Far East. Almost all cases seen in the US are from people who emigrated to the US from those places, or have picked up on this habit from seeing it in family members.

We're talking like 1 in a million here without reverse smoking.