Dang Tooth

It's another cloudy morning here in Lombard. I'm heating water for tea and waiting for a phone call from the dentist's office.

Wednesday I had a root canal (technically, I had Endodontic therapy performed on four root canals in molar #30) and by Friday night the pain was so bad that I couldn't even bear to breathe through my open mouth. When the pain really gets going it feels like it is in all the teeth on the right side of my head, my right temple, my right eye socket, and the right side of my skull.

So this morning I called the office to find out what I should do. I'm wondering, is it infected, what should I do for the pain? They said they would page Dr. McCall and call me back.

Ten years ago I had a molar pulled. I didn't have insurance, the thing was causing a lot of pain, and it was the easy and inexpensive thing to do. But I always second guessed the decision and wondered if it would have been more responsible to try to save the tooth with a root canal. Now that I know what "saving" the tooth really means, I wish I had pulled this one too! Seriously. After the procedure, which took more than two hours (three hours if you count the first part) and was far from painless, the doctor told me that the tooth would now effectively die, grow more and more brittle, and eventually could possibly crack. So we went to all that trouble to keep a dead, ticking time bomb of a tooth in my head? I don't get it.

Wednesday PM

It hurts, holy cow, it hurts! Novocaine worked fine but now that it has worn off I am feeling pretty stinking sorry for myself. Dr. McCall said they had to do four canals. I don't know how many they normally do in a root canal but he acted like that was a lot. Ross was very nice and went and got me yummy soft foods from Boston Market for dinner. Right now I'm just counting down the minutes until I can take another pain reliever and then I'm gonna try to find something distracting to watch on Hulu.