andrewdotcoza

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.

When I was very much younger I had to suffer braces on my teeth for a few years. The experience was uncomfortable and unpleasant but, every Friday, I would bravely face the dentist and allow him to inflict upon me the most unspeakable acts of torture. He was a kind man, and the experience somehow never registered in my memory as being extraordinarily bad.

Between puberty and adulthood, however, I developed a morbid fear of dentistry in general, and dentists in particular. Aside from the very occasional emergency work, I have studiously avoided them* and evaded having a proper dental checkup for something like a decade.

Very recently I succumbed to an unpleasant toothache, at which point the dentistry profession commenced the extraction of something like back-pay for all those years of neglecting my teeth. In the last month, I have suffered through three fillings and a most uncomfortable clean, which was performed with an instrument that I feel sure must have been invented by Dr Joseph Mengele himself.

That said, my dentist herself is a very kind and competent person who has done her utmost, without success, to put me at my ease. I noticed on my first visit that she was wearing fishnets under her slacks. With the promise of extreme pain and the loud grinding noises, my dentistry differs from fetish night at Gandalf’s only in the absence of flashing lights. You would think that I would be comfortable, but I am not.

Today I returned to Dr Dominatrix unexpectedly. The last tooth that she filled had become increasingly sensitive, and then painful, to such an extent that I have spent most of the last week off my face on over-the-counter pain killers. It took her several seconds to decide that I needed that most dreaded of dental procedures, a root canal. Being aware of my phobia of dentistry, she primed the syringes and waited until the last moment before announcing what she was about to do, which was a good thing because only the fact that she was already poking 2″ needles into my gums prevented me from bolting. As a result, I am now one third of the way through the process.

The good news is that, contrary to public opinion, root canals are no more painful than a regular filling. The bad news is that there is a point during the procedure when they jab a needle-like springy file into the channels of your teeth, and keep on jabbing until you feel it poking into the meat that is inside your head, beyond your gums. Sweet Jesus! Thinking about it brings a tremor to my hand.

Truly, I have come closer to freaking out completely today than I have been for years. Tomorrow afternoon I get to go back for more. My advice is to brush and floss.

*: Not so studiously, during my time in medical school.