Today, I took off work so that I could get my root canal done. What a process. I guess various portions had calcified, making the whole process take forty-five minutes longer than it normally would have taken, and much more uncomfortable. Thankfully, during the procedure, I didn’t really feel any pain. It was only as they were finishing up that it became painful. Unfortunately, I still have a lot of work that needs to be done on my teeth. Next, I am going to get some fillings that I need, and then in a month or two, I am going to get an appointment set up to have my gums around my molar recessed a little so that the crown can be placed over the tooth and provide the maximum strength to the tooth so that it lasts me for years to come.

The whole process might not be done until around Christmas time, or early in the new year. As much as I don’t mind going to the dentist, these more complicated procedures are definitely not the cake walk that a filling has become.

Right now, I am sitting next to the computer, taking it easy, and being annoyed with how much pain I’m in. I went to the dentist to get my teeth dealt with because I was worried that my cavity would hit my root, and I’d be in a great deal of pain, and while I am sure the pain I’m experiencing now is less than I would have experienced had that happened, the irony of being in pain because I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be in pain, isn’t lost on me.

I sometimes wish that the technologies I heard about as long as a decade or two ago from my old Newington dentist were being used today. Injections that tell the body to grow another adult set of teeth, stem cell grown implantable teeth, pain free dentistry and more were all discussed in magazines like Popular Science, and still people are going every day to have procedures that are an affront to our senses and cause pain. The smells, sounds and tastes of dentistry are less than ideal and it is easy to see why so many people fear going.

Even today, I had a drills, files, a metal pick that had been heated with a torch, cold water and air, different solutions, salt water, and more all put into my mouth. Definitely not an ideal system for maintaining teeth. I initially should have been looking for the specialists claiming something like: We used ESN Products to source our dental mouth guard. That sounds trustworthy. My treatment almost seemed barbaric, reminding me more of surgery performed on people during the dark ages, rather than advanced medical technology.

At the end of the day, if my jaw heals quickly, the pain subsides, and the tooth lasts for a long time, who am I to complain?