Fun with root canals...

...NOT!

Well, let's see...it all started yesterday at 2pm. Went into the dentist because I called on Sunday and left a message that my tooth was starting to wake me up at night, bother me during the day, etc. Dentist called Monday morning and had me come in yesterday.

This is a tooth that the dentist has been watching for about a year. See, previous to this dentist - Dr. G_______, I went to a very crappy dentist. One that I even had to report to the dental board she was that bad. Unfortunately at the time, my dental coverage didn't cover Dr. G. so I had to see inferior dentists. Skip forward a few years...I'm back with my wonderful dentist again and now he has to repair all the damage the crappy dentists did for years - and thank goodness, we're almost there!

Anyway, went in yesterday, emergency appointment. X-rays, cold ice thing, dental picks - diagnosis (no, not murder) = root canal - pronto.

He opened the tooth and took out as much of the dead stuff (sorry, not being technical now) he could, put a temp. on and sent me to the front to make another appointment for the next day (today).

What he explained to me was this...apparently, the canals in the tooth had started to close up on the ends and therefore there was very little blood supply to the tooth and therefore the nerves were dying a slow, painful death. This is in part due to aging (damn birthdays), genetics (thanks mom!), bad luck and well, just something that happens.

Go in today...I really expected it to be a fairly quick appointment, I mean after all, he did most of the work yesterday. Sat in the chair (on-time thankyouverymuch), got my first series of shots (I think there were 3) and waited 10 minutes. He re-opened the tooth and started cleaning out the canals. Now here's where it got tricky. I guess that particular tooth had canals so very thin that he had to go dig up a type of file that they haven't used in years. The tiniest and thinnest one they make. He used that and I practically jumped thru the ceiling, I still had some stray nerve fibers hanging around in there so I had to get (stop reading here if you're soon scheduled for a root canal) a shot DIRECTLY into the middle of the canal. Oy.

In the end, the tooth was so involved and was messed around with so much he didn't even want to completely close it up. So I got me some anti-biotics, some strong pain killers (they work!) and a temporary cap...until next week...when we get to do it all over again to finish it up.

Ow.