Root canal torture again
Posted at 21:41 on 22 January 2006
An acquaintance of mine has been nagging me over the past few weeks to add another blog entry. “You must be very busy,” he says. “You haven’t written anything new for a while.”
I have been very busy, as a matter of fact. I’ve also been recovering from another close encounter of the third kind with the dentist’s Hedstrom files, aka root canal treatment. I blogged previously about how this had been a relatively painless procedure a couple of years back when I had this done to two of my back teeth, so I was not too concerned when she said that I needed to get a third one done. I thought that it would be reassuring to anyone facing the procedure who came across my website via Google or Technorati to know that it wasn’t all that bad after all.
Come to think of it now, if I’d read that particular post a week ago, I’d have sued me first thing on Tuesday morning. So, before anyone else gets the same idea, I thought I’d better put the record straight.
To cut a long story short, imagine every stereotype you can think of about root canal treatment, and that is what I went through on Monday afternoon. Now take into consideration the fact that she hadn’t numbed me up and you get the picture. Normally this is okay — the nerve gets removed in the first appointment, so by the time you get to the second stage, you shouldn’t feel anything much anyway. However, in this particular case one of my root canals was very wide and she ended up overshooting the end of the tooth by a fraction of a millimetre. The result was rather interesting, to say the least. She explained that if she had numbed me up, it would not have been painful, but she wouldn’t have discovered that particular fact and would have botched up the treatment.
Fortunately the bill came to a good bit less than I was expecting, which was an immense relief. Perhaps they have some kind of policy that if it really hurts they give you a discount. Every dentist should, after all. At any rate, I headed straight for Boots and bought a packet of extra strong paracetamol tablets to tide me over for the rest of the day. The tooth was still sensitive for about three days afterwards, but it’s now settled down and for the first time in a while I can chew on it and drink cold water at that side of my mouth without it bothering me. And let’s hope too that this marks the end of all this rigmarole and my chompers remain trouble free for the rest of my life.