A few weeks ago, I posted about my root canal procedure, which was due to be concluded after another two visits to Dr Dominatrix. Very little about dentistry is comfortably predictable, and I have had quite a wild ride in the intervening time.
Root Canal part 2 involved a visit on the day after my initial post, simply to do some cleaning of the tooth. Root Canal part 3, which was supposed to be the final installment, was due exactly one week later. Due to some difficulty with an infection*, this visit landed up comprising another clean and an instruction to come back after another week had passed.
I have just returned from this fourth and final part of the saga and, even as I type this, feel a gentle tingling in my mouth as sensation returns. It was today that the dentist’s suction machine caught fire.
The final step of a root canal procedure involves packing rubber cylinders into the dental canals. This is not excessively uncomfortable, but does involve a considerable amount of forceful poking of a dental instrument into the deepest corners of your tooth. Once each root is packed, the dentist will burn the excess rubber off using the dental equivalent of a hot soldering iron. I was amazed how much I had come to trust this woman when I realised what she was busy doing.
Right after she was done with my first root, the Suction Machine of Mass Destruction detonated. She was using a loan unit from the medical supply company today because her proper one broke down yesterday. This unit sounded like a simple household vacuum cleaner and looked like a box made out of old kitchen cupboards, which might contain a simple household vacuum cleaner.
During our first prolonged suction session**, this device started to make a terrible grinding noise and produced the most frightful emanation of acrid smoke. This continued to issue prodigiously for some minutes as, with wisdom stemming from years of training, the dentist and her assistant decided that it would be safe to stay in the room as long as the defective machine was unplugged from the power. Thereafter I was instructed not to swallow, in case something nasty had fallen into my mouth.
The experience was dramatic and my dentistry continued with lots of cotton swabs and a growing sense of crisis as the assistant tried desperately to contact the medical supply company. To their credit, both the dentist and her assistant completed their tasks competently and with great aplomb, on what must surely have been a particularly bad day for them.
Now I am equipped with a refurbished, cyborg tooth. It should be sensitive for the next few days, but then settle down to its business of slowly becoming brittle before shattering, decades hence, necessitating the installation of a crown. Happy Times! Brush. Floss regularly.
*: I actually felt deliriously ill for a few days, but my doctor and dentist disagree over whether or not the cause was the tooth. I’ve stopped worrying about the answer because I feel better now.
**: Ah… no. Never mind.
Related posts:
