Well, actually, it’s about a drill.
A drill, some resin composite, several filings, and a post.
I broke a tooth last week you see. As tooth-breaks go, it wasn’t bad, a chip that didn’t cause pain, just grabbed my tongue’s attention all too often, but after having the extraction from hell last year, I knew better than to wait for pain, made a call last week, etc.
While I was in the waiting room this morning, I had a great chat with a guy in a Monkees t-shirt. Gotta love the way some people interpret men’s fashion. On the way out, the other patient, a cowboy named Dave, teased me about my hair, but it was good-natured.
My dentist, Dan Ferraro, is a very sweet, engaging guy, perhaps eight to fifteen years older than me, with the strawberry coloring typical of some Italians. My family has similar genes (I was strawberry blonde til I was fifteen), and refers to the blondest among it as “Golden Guineas,” but I didn’t mention that to him.
He was kind enough not to lecture me for not visiting the office in roughly eighteen months, and got a kick out of my pink hair and pink sneakers. He let me control the suction thingy, and used copious amounts of novocain because I’m resistant, and began what was supposed to be just an assessment, but quickly progressed to, “You’re here, I’m here, the next patient canceled, let’s do this now.”
I’d known since August 2006 that I’d likely need either a filling and crown or a root canal and crown, and the cool sonic root tester still put me at the borderline, but I was hoping for the former, rather than the latter, but it wasn’t to be. Happy Wednesday, MissMeliss. Here, have a root canal.
As root canals go, it wasn’t awful. Dr. Ferraro works quickly, with deft fingers. He’s funny, but focused, and he’s flexible. I don’t like the foam things that keep your mouth open for you, so he didn’t make me use it. “Ask if you need it,” he said. I prefer to have the ability to close my mouth when he isn’t sticking stuff in it, and didn’t need it. He’s also anti-dental dam. I asked about one, and he said, “Oh, those things that make you feel like there’s an umbrella stuck down your throat? They were just becoming popular when I finished dental school in ‘86. I gave them up in ‘87. There are better ways to keep stuff from going down people’s throats.”
“And this,” I said, “Is why I came back to you.”
The root canal wasn’t that bad. He filled it, but didn’t crown it. I have another $2500 worth of dental work left to do, and we’re doing it in $599 - $700 chunks over the next few months. The root canal already killed my dental insurance for the year because we have a limit on total dollar amounts, but the rest of the work is crowns and fillings, nothing hugely expensive.
I got a jamba juice on the way home, then stopped at Walgreens to fill the prescriptions for vicodin and amoxycillin. There was no pain earlier, but then the numbness went away, and the pain replaced it. I took two ibuprofen as soon as I got home, which helped the headache I’d developed, but I took a vicodin as soon as I finished the article I had to write, and will probably take a second one after dinner, to make sure I sleep, because it’s been about four hours and the pain is back in my consciousness.
In other news, my autographed copy of Dreamland, the new cd by Brent Spiner arrived yesterday. Head over to Bibliotica, and read my review.
Yours