Teeth Part 2

I went to the dentist again last Sunday. That was the 18th of January. I still had three more teeth to be fixed all of which were prime candidates for root canals as the doctor had informed me. I was hoping that at least one of them could be fixed with just filling but the doctor wasn’t very optimistic. She never was. I hate it when she goes “tsk, tsk, tsk” as she shakes her head while operating on me. It sounds as if I was just about to lose all my teeth or die.

I was hoping she could start on the teeth on my right because one of them already felt like it was going to crack if I bit really hard on it. Instead, she started drilling on the tooth on my left. She said she wanted to see if it could be saved, if the nerve hadn’t been exposed yet. What could I do? She was the doctor and I was a mere patient.

The weird thing about that day was she had this apprentice or something hovering above me while she did her thing. She was a nice looking young lady in the clinic’s trademark green scrubs. She was assisting – a new dentist apparently – said my doctor. I was tapping my fingers the entire time. It’s awkward enough having a person look into your mouth while you’re lying on a chair helpless, what more having two? The girl would peer into my mouth once in a while to see what my dentist was doing. Sometimes, my dentist would point out something to her and then she would sort of nod her head in affirmation. She would also pull on that thing that sucks saliva if the dentist was having trouble manipulating her drill in my mouth or if she had trouble reaching the far end of the tooth.

So she proceeded drilling and drilling and drilling into the tooth, avoiding sensitive painful areas. I have to admit that she’s pretty good, always easy on the gas but quick on the brakes. This also meant she was very slow. In fact, I fell asleep for bit while she was busy with the tooth. It lasted two hours for heaven's sake. It's a good thing that they have one of those rubber things that they wedge into your teeth so that you don't get tired keeping it open.

Finally, having drilled away about half my tooth she pronounced that it could not be saved by mere fillings alone and required a root canal. Of course, at that point I had no choice but to agree because she’d already drilled that far down. A root canal costs 8,000 pesos a tooth and I wanted to find another dentist or clinic that charged at least 2000 bucks less. Unfortunately, that time I was pretty much caught in a bind. So there began my three-week love affair with the root canal. It’s going to take another two weeks until the tooth can finally be filled in with permanent pasta.

She began by introducing some topical anaesthesia around the tooth and injected some local anaesthesia. She drilled away some more until the nerve was fully exposed. Midway she had to inject another dose of anaesthesia because it was still all too painful to bear. She injected the dose directly into the nerve. It was an extremely painful procedure, which, to my delight, ended rather quickly since the anaesthesia was quite fast acting. We had discussed during the course of the drilling that once the nerve had been fully exposed, she would be depositing some medicine that would kill the nerve and that this medicine would be rather painful, once applied and so on after the operation.

I did not know the meaning of pain until the night after that appointment. I was practically debilitated on the couch even after having downed 500 mg of Ibuprofen. I sat with my face down on the sofa and its many pillows, still in the clothes I had worn to the clinic, trying to wish away all the pain. I woke up the following morning still in the same clothes with a feeling that everything had been just a nightmare. But moving my tongue around in my mouth, I found a patch of rather rough temporary past on the tooth which had cause me so much pain the night before. It wasn’t just a dream after all.