Drill That Tooth!
If anyone knows me well, they know that I have one large fear in my life. Dentists. I’m not sure why. I’ve always had good dental care growing up and with the exception of a sadistic orthodontist that would make the Steve Martin charachter in Little Shop Of Horrors look like mother Teresa, have had no other incidents.
None the less, it’s my kryptonite.
I’ve done my best to get past it by finding usually the one dentist in town that will inject me with three times the normal dosages of novacaine, but the sounds and smells still send me into a panic attack.
So, last November I got a bit more than the actual Macadamian nut I bit into when I discovered half of a tooth that fell out of my mouth. The tooth literally split in half.
Besides the funny feeling, I must have luckily missed the nerve as there was no pain. Lucky me. No pain, no need for a dentist right?
Well………
It started with a dull pain that would come and go every other day about 2 weeks ago and could be tamed with an Advil or two. I figured it was only going to get worse, and since being new to this town, decided to start my quest for a local “Dr. Feelgood”. I came across a dentist in town that practiced this new thing called sedation dentistry.
What? They knock you out? You don’t feel a thing? They do a years worth of work in 4 hours while you sleep?
Where do I sign up!
Then the pain went from a 6 to an 11 in the course of about 2 days. I went from being able to manage it to “Get this F**KING thing outta my mouth”. Scenes of Tom Hanks performing a self root canal with a rock and a coconut actually sounded doable and perfectly capable at 3:00 in the morning.
Well, it comes to find out that in order to do the total sedation where they knock you out totally, you need to have a physical exam from your doctor plus another $400, both of which I didn’t have or cared to wait to get. So I settled for plan 2 which they gave me a Zanax the night before and then right before the procedure.
(insert Purple Haze background music now)
Wowee! The dentist numbed me up and at that point he could have taken out my liver, changed me to a her or given a “Happy Ending”. I didn’t care. All was good in the world. And with the exception to me sleeping for another 8 hours, I am now the happy owner of a new crowned tooth.
