Back in one of my endless vacations to Iraq, I bit into a date and cracked a filling which caused this mind numbing pain which I resolved to take care of the next morning at dental. Next morning came about and there was no pain so I promptly forgot about it and went along with whatever kind of work I had made for myself. Half a year goes by and I’m getting ready to do my enlistment stuff, one of those little blocks is a dental screening which I was a little over due. So I went in there and they took X-rays and said, “Hey, you have a cracked filling here and from what it looks like on the X-ray, maybe a cavity underneath it”.
Okay, set myself up for an appointment to get it fixed and alas, I came back in at the appointed time. I’m sitting there in the waiting room waiting for my appointment and the dental tech calls me into the X-ray room for some more shots and passes me over to the X-ray tech.
The X-ray dude says to me, “Ahh, in here for a root canal?”
“Huh? Root canal? No just for a filling.”
“The guy that brought you in here is the root canal tech, everybody he brings in here gets a root canal or a root canal work up, which means you get a root canal.”
Suddenly the image in my mind of that nice fellow that brought me morphed into and executioner. Oh no, I’ve been brushing twice a day, flossing, all the things that you’re supposed to do!
The Root Canal tech came by and took me one of their dental rooms and lays me down in one of those futuristic chairs that holds your head below the rest of your body and the Dentist came in. Young guy, probably younger then me, he looks at the new X-rays and says “Yep, that cavity goes all the way to the nerve.”
So they stick that rubber wedge in my mouth and my mouth doesn’t open very far because of some genetic reason. So my mouth is opened to beyond what is humanly possible, they start putting little clamping things around the tooth then get a dental dam that separates that tooth away from the rest of my mouth and sticks this suction thing down my throat.
He turns on the drill and I spend the next hour or so trying not to choke while he and the tech jam out on the local rock station. Blood is rushing to my head, I can’t swallow and there’s a set of hands doing loud painful things in my mouth.
“UGH!!!” What the hell was that, he says, “just yanking out this nerve”. After a seeming eternity with more drilling, he puts in another clamp, steps back for 30 seconds then unclamps it and starts taking apart and removing what seems like a pile of torture instruments. At last the bite block comes out, oh sweet relief!
He says, “here is an appointment card to finish up the root canal”
“What? I need another root canal?”
“No we have to fill in this one and cap it.”
Arrrgghh! I’m all against torture but I think all we need to do to those insurgents is take care of all of their dental problems without telling them what is going on (sort of like what happened to me), they’ll be talking in no time. Just kidding, I don't really hate them, they did a good job but man oh man, ouch!
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