Crest Night Effects – Part I
After I had my tooth fixed I thought that it would be a good idea to whiten my teeth, too. Therefore I bought the tooth whitening product Crest Night Effects at the Costco store in Kirkland. As soon I had bought the product at the end of June 2004 I used it. I applied it over a period of 2 weeks until I noticed that I had an adverse reaction to this specific product. But when I contacted people (dentist and lawyers) to support my claim so that I could hold Proctor & Gamble accountable I experienced very unusual events. But let’s start to tell the story from the beginning.
Every other day I applied one application from the 28 applications in the package on my teeth; mostly on my lower frontal teeth because they are almost all natural. I had used gel kind versions of tooth whitening before, and I had never had any problems with the gel. So, when I applied this product, I never imagined that this product could damage my teeth.
But when I woke up on Wednesday, 14th July 2004, I felt very sharp cutting edges on my lower teeth when my tongue touched them. Therefore I examined my teeth closer in the mirror as soon as I got up. And when I looked at my teeth I thought I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My teeth had sharp edges, flat planes on the frontal surface, and some parts of my teeth were almost cut in half at some spots. I felt like crying. I didn’t know that this would be the beginning of an ordeal that I would not want someone else to go through nor did I want to repeat this myself.
On that day I asked a woman at the 24 Fitness club what to do when considering to complain about a product. She told me to call King 5 and ask for a consumer representative. When I came back home, I called King 5, but the consumer representative didn’t’ seem interested. But she asked for my phone number. And on the same day I wrote a TV and newspaper person, an attorney, and made an appointment with the dentist in Vancouver who had last time seen my teeth at the beginning of June 2004. He would be able to attest that my teeth had been fine the last time he had seen me. He gave me an appointment for July 20th. I also called the phone number on the package from Proctor & Gamble and reported the damage. The Proctor & Gamble person asked for my age and told me that she’ll refund me the purchase price. On that evening I went to my neighbor and told her what had happened. She advised me not to accept the cheque and to talk to a lawyer. And that is what I did. I didn’t cash in the cheque and I tried to get a lawyer in the Seattle area to take on a product liability case, which proved with time to be impossible.
The next day I called two of my sisters and a person I knew here in Washington State to tell them what had happened to me. I needed someone who comforted me. But the only response I got was that one of my sisters told me that I shouldn’t try everything and she laughed when I described how my teeth looked now. Additionally she said “Du bist aber auch ein Pechvogel,†which means something like ‘you are an unlucky fellow.’ At that moment I felt abandoned, and the following months and years proved that my feeling didn’t prove me wrong. When I talked to my mother a few days later, she also questioned why I wanted to try new things like teeth whitening.
For ease of reading I’ll describe my experiences with different dentists and lawyers pertaining to this case in others posts marked Crest Night Effects Part II and so on.