From broken to more broken to FIXED.

So it seems as though every enormous amalgam (silver filling) I take out, there appears to be a huge crack running down the middle of the tooth.  It's like the filling acts as a wedge or ax head and splits the tooth apart.
When that happens, sometimes they need a root canal, other times we can stick a crown on the tooth to hold it together and they end up being just fine... this tooth is one of those.

First I had to remove the silver filling, THEN I had to recreate the entire tooth out of amalgam so we would have a nice strong base to put a new shiny gold crown on.

Tooth rebuilt out of a silver filling

Then, we removed enough of the tooth so that we can put a cute little gold crown on top of it and then took an impression of that.

Tooth prepared for a gold crown

THEN the fun part...we make the gold crown down in the laboratory.

NOW, we can try it in the mouth, and if everything looks perfect, we end up cementing it in the mouth.

...and of course I can't find the picture of the cemented crown.  I will see him again soon, and have to take another final picture:)  WHOOPS.