I am shuddering. This is Cronenberg levels of body horror. I suppose I must have known this was how it worked, but I figured there was more to it than that and that dentists had to do something more dentist-y to make it take.
https://myhillsdentist.com/blog/why-dont-we-do-tooth-transpl...
The same thing happened to me. 10 year down the line the inside of the tooth has been mostly absorbed by the bone leaving it fragilized (which, according to my dentist, is a common occurrence in those cases).
I just spent a year working with my dentist to replace the teeth with an artificial one.
One other thing... the night it happened, the game was at 10:30 and there really isn't anything the emergency room visit can do other than provide pain meds etc. So I just drove myself home and my wife kept bugging me to go to the hospital, but I kept telling her there really was no point. The worst part of that night was trying to sleep; I actually slept clinching a rag in my mouth to keep the tooth in position and to absorb blood from the rest of the damage. The pain of the open nerves was pretty hard to deal with too.
Didn't sleep much, easily the worst night of my life that I can think of. Fortunately I have an excellent dentist here in Denver (Icon Dental) and I was able to book an emergency visit for 8AM the next morning that night so I knew I just had to make it to morning.
This isn’t a game to them, it’s their job, and one they fought hard their entire lives for. The system selects for elite talent from all over the globe that is wired to persevere at all costs. For the extremely few who make it to the finals of the top league in their sport, especially late in their career, they know they may never get another opportunity to capstone their life’s work. It’s beyond comprehension for them to just roll over at the finish line and let someone else take what is theirs.
After all that misery now you've got a real shot at a Cup? You bet your ass they're going to stay in the game until they can't.
And then there is the financial incentives for winning the championship...
Your eyes are spaced horizontally. This makes it pretty easy to ignore narrow vertical elements: if one eye gets blocked there's a good chance the other eye can still see around it. The same thing doesn't go for horizontal elements. If one eye is blocked the other is likely to be blocked too: you'd need to move your head to see in that blind spot.
It'd make for a pretty neat research project, Make various sight obstructing hats with varying amounts and sizes of horizontal/vertical elements and see what its effects are on reaction speed, tracking a moving target, See if diagonal elements are better than horizontal ones etc etc.
In any case I can imagine a cage like that being annoying, but (to me at least) that doesn't really weigh up to the risk of injury.
Like wearing glasses, I imagine.
I used to play with a guy that had one of those half cages with visor top half, would be tempted to try that if I needed to replace mine, but not enough to get one before then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21477839.
The work they did on the top teeth was pretty much the most painful, least fun medical I've ever had to go through. Pulling those two top teeth that were broke off at the gum-line was extremely unpleasant. At one point the dentist had to put her knee on the chair/left side of my ribs to get enough leverage to pull one of the two. My wife couldn't even watch and said it was like a scene from a movie.
This is after playing hockey since the age of 6 (I'm 52) and not wearing a cage for roughly 30 years (since I stopped playing in college).
I had a very strange desire to buy/put on a full cage a few weeks before this happened and even started to research which to buy but got interrupted and lost my traction on the whole idea.
To date this has run me over 10k and I still have to get my final implants.
And yes I do wear a cage now, and it's crazy how often I catch a stick/puck to the face now. I guess I used up all my karma and was getting lucky for years. I attribute this 'luck' mostly to playing with other ex-college and pro players whom generally know how to keep their stick down and in control.
Incidentally the person that hit me was a female defense-men in a co-ed league; she'd played high level college and was groomed for the women's Olympic team on one point, so I don't fault her, it was a freak accident mostly caused by her being tiny (just over 5ft on skates); if she was an average sized guy out there the stick would have hit me in the half-shield or top of the helmet.
Either way, yeah cage on now and I regret not making the transition sooner.
Also - I give USA Hockey Organization high marks, they have so far covered about 90% of the costs and were easy to deal with. I actually lost my previous job because of all this, I also sustained a concussion (and a partially fractured jaw), and they were not very sympathetic to my drop in production so the coverage from USA Hockey has been a huge positive in all this.