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After 18-year-old Abbie Kilbride finally got her braces removed, she wanted to celebrate and enjoy her new smile by having her teeth whitened.
She never expected that her happy plan or the fairly common procedure would backfire.
Abbie arranged to have the procedure done by a locally-based woman. Even before the procedure began, the first warning signs had already appeared. Before the hour-long procedure, Abbie was never asked about her age and didn’t have any allergy tests performed. She simply underwent the procedure and recalls that the woman kept reapplying the bleaching gel every 10-15 minutes.
By the time the treatment was finished, Abbie’s mouth was already numb. The practitioner, however, wrote this off and simply told Abbie to use some lipstick to cover it.
A few hours later, Abbie’s mouth still showed no signs of improvement, so she treated it at home with ice and antihistamine. But this was to no avail.
The next day, the reaction had gotten worse. Abbie couldn’t drink and her entire mouth and tongue were numb, so she decided to seek out professional help. Her general practitioner, however, only laughed at her and told Abbie that she’d done something “extremely stupid.”
Abbie was then left with no other choice but to find other help. Her chemist offered Bonjela (an ointment for ulcers and sores) for her sores, but the blisters in her mouth only continued to get worse. Smaller, white blisters grew and combined into large, yellow blisters on the insides of her lips.
On the third day, Abbie finally called Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) and visited three different dentists. At that point, her mouth was suffering from a reaction that was strong enough to be comparable to “third degree burns.”
The situation is now safely handled, but Abbie is still on a strict diet of soup and scrambled eggs until her mouth completely heals. She has since posted about her horrible experience on her Facebook page, in hopes that her story will warn others from having a teeth whitening procedure done with an unofficial person.
