How Mairead got her freedom - and her smile - back after 30 years of dentures.
For more than three decades, Mairead lived with a denture. It started after a knock on the jaw playing camogie at sixteen, and grew into a quiet, daily worry that ran her life from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning to the moment she closed them at night.
Sitting down to a meal, she'd look at a piece of steak and wonder if it would even stay in her mouth. She couldn't chew gum. She couldn't laugh without bracing herself. She shied away from presentations at work, hung back in conversations, and quietly kept tubes of Fixodent everywhere — in her bag, her pocket, her car, two or three more in the bathroom.
"It took over my whole day. From the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed at night. It was a full-time job."
She'd lain in bed at night crying, wondering whether to do something about it. She'd heard the horror stories about Turkey — people coming home with mouths full of problems and no aftercare. She knew that wasn't for her.
Then she saw an advert for Truly Dental.
Mairead admits she'd never enjoyed dentists.
The drills, the injections, the dread of a chair she'd been visiting since she was a teenager. So walking in to meet Dr. Jimmy for the first time, she expected the worst.
It wasn't like that at all.
"It was like I knew him all my life. Couldn't be more reassuring. He explained everything so well — what was going to be done, what to expect — and I just sailed through it."
In a single evening, Dr. Jimmy extracted six or seven teeth and placed her implants under sedation. The next day she came back for her temporary bridge. Three months later, her permanent bridge was in. Done.
The procedure she'd been terrified of — the one that had kept her awake at night for years — was, in her own words, "over in an hour and a half. So fast. So done and dusted."
There was no pain. No drama. Just relief.
The change in Mairead's life since the implants is something she still smiles about.
She can eat steak. She can bite into apples and pears. She can even chew gum again. The constant background hum of will it fall out? has gone completely. Her family noticed first.
"My brother said to me, 'God, you can talk! You're speaking very well now.' I said yes — because I'm not afraid anymore."
Her grandchildren tell her she looks great. They tell her she's smiling more. They tell her she's doing more. And she is.
No more shopping lists with Fixodent on them. No more dashing to the bathroom before every conversation. No more covering her mouth, holding back her laugh, or hiding from the camera.
"The real wide is wide now. Totally different."
At her retirement party, she sat for four hours, chatted to everyone who came up to shake her hand, and didn't have to slip away to the bathroom even once.
"Life-changing. I couldn't put a price on it."
Mairead had thought about going abroad. Like a lot of people, she'd seen the cheap deals and the social media before-and-afters.
But the stories of people coming home with broken teeth and nowhere to turn put her off.
At Truly Dental, she gets something the bargain trips can't offer: a clinician she trusts, top-quality work, and proper aftercare close to home. She comes back once a year for a check-up, and if anything ever needed attention, she'd just pick up the phone.
If you've spent years dreading meals, hiding your smile, or carrying half-used tubes of denture adhesive everywhere you go — Mairead's message is simple:
You don't have to live like that. And you don't have to go abroad to fix it.
— Mairead, Truly Dental patient, treated by Dr. Jimmy
