Rooting Out (and Rooting For) Root Canals

Thank God for dentists. I think dentists are some of the most wonderful people to have walked the face of the earth since the beginning of mankind. They are the salt of the earth, God's gift to humanity, the creme de la creme, the pillars and foundations of society...

Oooh, blissful relief... never was anaesthesia such ambrosia. :D

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Haha... actually, it was quite good, the root canal. I just have to erase the memory of medieval-looking instruments (ok, I exaggerated. they're quite designer-looking) scraping against my teeth (the feeling is so... you know that feeling you get when you hear metal scrape against metal?).

What's a root canal btw? Wikipedia has the answer... (just google lah!)

But apart from that, it was a very fascinating session. What the dentist did was to first find which tooth had the decay. This is A Very Important Question. She felt my chin and neck, and found that the infection had spread to the surrounding area of my gum, and there was an abscess in the gum. Yes, it was pretty bad.

So she began the root canal treatment. Thank God that the needle (it was pretty big actually) wasn't painful at all. Really. It did take a few minutes for the anaesthesia to fully activate though.

Then the dentist pulled out my metal filling. THAT was a jarring shock. One moment she's tugging at your filling... the next moment you feel a giant metallic 'pop' resonating in your skull.

Then she began the drilling. It was so cool actually. The drill is not what I imagined it to be... I had imagined the dental drill as something akin to a Bosch and Decker electric drill, you know, the kind that contractors simply LOVE to turn on at 9 am in the morning, when you're trying to catch some precious sleep after an all-nighter.

It was actually quite quiet, and painless in a way. Saw my tooth enamel being vapourised into fine powder. After she did that, she squirted some more anaesthetic into my tooth, after seeing me starting to wince a bit.

Wincing is a crucial aspect of effective interpersonal communication between your dentist and you. Because he can't understand Polish, German, Hokkien, Cantonese and Swahili, which I somehow miraculously acquire the ability to speak all in one breath.

"Does it hurt?"

"!Ngoaighwaouggggachtungaaaah!!!"

"Ok, it hurts."

Then, the feeling became stranger. Felt a warm feeling spreading through the left side of my neck. Seems that the nerve from my decayed tooth also runs through my neck.

Then after that, the dentist used some fine wires to scrape and clean the inside of my decayed tooth out. It felt quite good actually, especially when she cleaned out the abscess underneath my molar. An achingly good kind of sensation - something like a massage of sorts. Weird, huh?

Then she filled it up and sealed it.

I would like to say that the pain went away instantly, but that didn't really happen. It still ached, because of the infection, not just inside the tooth, but also in the surrounding areas - I guess the jawbone and the gums were affectecd.

But thank God so much for antibiotics. I've taken four of the pills today, and the symptoms are reversing. Originally, it was painful tenderness, but now it's just an irritating "itchy" feeling inside my gums, and I think in the next few days, the pain should go completely away once I'm done with the antibiotics. :)

And oh yeah, want to thank God for some things too that happened. Turns out that hte root canal treatment was a whole lot cheaper than was actually listed. $115 instead of $250. Wow! Thank God... :D

And I also got to meet this lady from Lions Befrienders at the dental clinic. It's some community service organization mentioned in the Singapore21 report. She said to me that she was looking high and low for the past one year for a multimedia developer for a volunteer project... I'm still thinking whether to take up this volunteer project.

Yup, that's the account of my root canal. It was a good learning experience, and really want to thank God for His grace to me...