dannydmc

I just had the single most miserable time at the dentist today. It all began rather innocently enough; I had had the first stage of a root canal preformed about a month and a half go and today was the scheduled time to get the rest of the operation taken care of. My first experience hadn't been that bad, believe it or not, and so I wasn't to worried about this one; also, I had had what I thought to be a gum infection for a while and wanted the dentist to take a look at it.
Now, I'm not sure if you know what the root canal entails, but if you don't, don't worry; I'm not going to go into to much detail as I don't want to gross anyone out too badly. Suffice to say, its when an infection occures in a tooth and the nerves have to be removed, antibiotics applied, and then the tooth capped. The removal of the root more or less kills the tooth; or at least deadens it to most sensation.
I had had most of the nerves removed on the first visit and so both myself and the dentist didn't expect there to be much pain, as a result novicain was not offered and I didn't think of asking for it. The entire operation was meant to last only 40 minutes. The problems began because the tooth is a back molar and hard to get to; apparently, I also have very difficult roots or some shit. To make a long story short it took over an hour and a half, there was substantially more nerves left in the tooth than I thought, and I spent an hour and a half in utter agony.
Of course, I didn't expect it to last that long and so I kept telling myself it would only be another five minutes and i could endure what ever discomfort that was being thrown at me. But I was wrong; it just kept going on, and on and on. The dentist (who is a very nice man who I have a lot of respevt for) was obviously getting irritated by the difficulty of the tooth, although he remained calm and was trying to hide his irritation, and I didn't want to stop him to get the novicaine because A) I am absolutely terrified of needles in my mouth and B) I was afraid that if I did it would kept take even longer.
For an hour and half I suffered through it; I seriously was almost in tears at one point and was whimpering (something which I am not usually prone to doing; I consider myself fairly tough). I think at one point I came near to passing out (although that was actually during another incident which I will discuss later). The end result was that it was impossible to keep the tooth dry, and although the root canal was finished sans the cap, there is no garuntee that it will stick and I might still end up losing the tooth.
As for the second part of this, I found out that the supposed irritation was actually a small growth which was removed (oddly enough, it was at this point I got light headed and thought I was going down for the count; even though it was very easily done) and sent in for a biopsy. I know that this is all standard procedure and its very unlikely that there is seriously anything wrong; but when the word cancer gets thrown around even in phrases such as "a very low probability of" it freaks me out more than a little. I was, naturally, thinking about this little factoid during the entire root canal experience which might have helped by keeping my mind off of the needles in my tooth, but didn't do much for my state of mind.
And so I left the dentist in a bit of a hellish mood to say the least ("When I leave this office I am going to start swearing" I told my sister who was with my. In true sisterly fashion she responded with "Well, _I_ don't want to hear it) I wasn't upset with the dentist who was doing the best he could considering the circumstances, but jsut generally pissed off at the world and my mouth. I did manage to not follow up my threat of an outbrust at least.
Afterwards me and Jen, my sister, headed to the Leinenkugel's Brewery for a tour in Chippewa Falls. I'm going to be traveling for most the rest of the summer and Jen wanted to spend a bit more time with me before I left. Me and her used to compete so much when we were younger, but despite that have always been very close; and so we both had a good time. Also, I got some free samples of my favorite beer; so that did a lot to take the edge off of my day.
Tomorrow I start traveling out to Denver to see some friends from college who I haven't been able to get together with for the last year and a half. After that I'll go going out to DC to see some of my friends from Ireland, and then cutting back to Detroit for my best friend's Birthday (he's also promised to get me laid Even if he did point out that I might have to pay for it )
Right now I'm just waiting for my Mom to come home from working 2nd shift at work and downloading music onto my new iPod which I bought the other day. I figure that if I can get all of my music on it, I can leave my CDs at home and take the iPod up with me to Alaska. I love the thing; its so nice to finally join the 21st century


P.S. I loved the Hank III concert on Saturday; I got to even ahve my picture taken with Hank and got an autograph. Pictures from the show will come be uploaded