Last week I left you with a cliffhanger—would I survive the dental debacle or would I run screaming like a crybaby into oncoming traffic? Were you worried? I wasn't. But I should have been. I arrived to the emergency dental appointment on Tuesday, sure I was going to get a round of antibiotics and be feeling better in no time. That is not what happened.
He sprayed something on a q-tip and poked the tooth.
"Yow!" I said, just about levitating out of the chair.
"It's not infected," he said. "And you don't need a root canal. If the nerves were dead, you wouldn't feel a thing. Let's try putting some desensitizing liquid on it and put the temporary back on. See what happens. Sound good? Okay. Maybe we can numb it up a little bit," he said.
What do you mean, a little bit? I didn't find the uncertainty in his voice reassuring. I laid there with some misgivings as he prepared the giant silver needle ray gun. He came at me from below, thinking he could fool me, but this was not my first rodeo in a dental chair. However, I welcomed the pinch and pull and stabbing pain with my trademark stoicism because I was pretty sure sweet oblivion would soon be happening.
"I'm going to go check on my other patient," the dentist said, stripping off his gloves. I sat in the chair and stared out the window at the cloudy sky, hoping to soon be able to rest my tense shoulders and relax my furrowed brow. I patted my face a few times. Was it getting numb? Not fast enough for me.
All too soon, the dentist returned.
"It's not numb," I said.
"I think the desensitizing agent will help," he said. "But it is going to be very cold at first. And I have to paint all four nerves."
Four nerves! I was definitely on my last one. However, I dutifully winched open my mouth. He dipped a giant q-tip in something and painted my tooth. Instantly, pain shot down through my jaw into my spine, shattering my vertebrae as it went. I whimpered a tiny bit until the pain receded.
"Hang on," he said and painted another part of the tooth.
I groaned. I'd never experienced pain like this in my life. Worse than being socked in the jaw by my older brother. Worse than falling nose first onto concrete (also courtesy of my older brother). I realize now how fortunate I have been to have escaped serious pain until age 67. My luck had just run out.
He painted another part of the tooth. I gripped my own hand and dug in. I would have drawn blood if I'd had any fingernails. The pain was excruciating. I could not help moaning. One of my moans turned into a despairing chuckle.
"People don't usually laugh when I do this," he said. Then he painted another side of the tooth. At that point, I wasn't sure if I was going to pass out, choke on my own spit, or have a heart attack. Any of those would have been fine with me if they would just lead to a cessation of pain.
"Almost done," he said and came at me again. The word torture crossed my mind several times.
Finally, the tooth painting was over. He slapped the temporary back on and let his assistant deal with my trauma while he went to take care of his next patient. My woes had put a serious dent in their schedule. I successfully resisted the urge to apologize.
I staggered out the door. The taste in my mouth, the smell in my head, the pounding in my jaw . . . I wasn't sure if I was going to make it to my car. I gagged a couple times, and prepared myself to hurl into the dirt beyond the curb. Gradually, the pain settled to a one-mule kick in the jaw instead of a twenty-mule team kick. I got into my car and thought maybe, just maybe, I might make it.
Within five minutes, I was feeling great. Well, great in comparison to what I'd just experienced. Being relatively pain free compared to enduring the most horrendous pain I'd ever felt in my life is the most amazing kind of freedom. Going through such exquisite gut-wrenching pain and emerging victorious made me feel like I could do just about anything.
Which is a good thing, because on Friday, I was back in the hot seat for the permanent crowns. I was apprehensive but the prospect of finally having two crowns and a lovely bridge in between was a siren call lulling me into believing everything would be okay. Call it vanity if you must. I just really wanted a tooth back in that gap.
"Do you want novocaine?" the assistant asked me.
I felt my body clench from jaw to pelvis. "Do you think I should?"
"It shouldn't hurt much," she said. "Most people don't need it."
I grimaced, not wanting her to think me a wimp. "Okay, let's try it."
It took over an hour for the dentist to grind the new appliance into shape so I could bite without breaking my jaw. In and out, in and out, pressing hard, youch, bite now, bite and chew, bite, bite, bite, okay. Check the little paper. Grinding, polishing, grind some more, bite bite bite.
"This a strange form of sculpture, isn't it?" I mused during one short grinding break. It occurred to me, I probably would have made a good cosmetic dentist, back in my younger days when my eyes and hands were cooperating.
"You have a deep overbite," he said.
"You make it sound like that's a bad thing," I said.
"If you don't mind . . . " he said and proceeded to grind some of the enamel off the upper teeth on that side. Whatever, I thought. It's on the inside, nobody will see.
After an hour and a half, we agreed the bite was satisfactory.
"The cement will be cold," he warned. He loaded up the glue and jammed the new bridge home.
"Yow!" I grunted incoherently as he held the thing in place and zapped it with a blue light to cure the glue. Irradiated and in misery, all I could do was lie there and hope I would not choke on my own saliva. Breathe, I told myself, just breathe.
This back and forth had taken longer than expected. He was running way late. Once again I resisted the urge to apologize. Finally he unclipped my bib. As I wobbled to my feet, he told me I needed to get a special kind of floss to clean under the bridge so I wouldn't get tooth decay there, causing the whole thing to fail.
And then he was gone to the room next door. I heard him welcome his patient with a jovial tone, as if he hadn't just spent a tedious hour installing an edifice over the chasm in my jaw. I thought, maybe he just really likes his job. Later I found out he was starting a week's vacation the next day.
Since then, pain comes and goes. It moves around. The brutalized tooth seems quiescent. However, my jaw hinge throbs sometimes, and the nerves that he shot with his nasty silver needle ray gun sometimes quiver with rage. My neck has knots like the bumps on an alligator. I wonder if I will ever be the same.
Good news: ibuprofen. Other good news: lousy memory. By the time the next dental crisis rolls around, I will probably have forgotten how it felt to experience the worst pain of my life. Someday soon, I predict I will be chomping apples on that fake tooth without a care. Even if I reread this blog, I won't remember the depth of my misery. It will all blend into one traumatic experience that I survived. The silver lining in the ongoing old age slow-motion catastrophe that is me.
