Root Canal

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There are some things that just shouldn’t be done. Like drilling a hole in my teeth!

If you know me even a little bit, you can probably imagine me cringing at the very least. I’m a wimp and I know it.

Last Tuesday (Jun 1^st), right after all the wedding festivities (thankfully not during it), I developed a slight toothache near my top left teeth that progressively got worse and worse until it became unbearable by Thursday. I hate doctors, hospitals, and anything in that sphere… so of course I let the pain get worse and worse until I couldn’t tolerate it at all before scheduling an appointment for the dentist as my last resort. It got so bad that I needed to be biting my finger to alleviate the pain like I was a child teething or something.

I tried tylenol after tylenol to no avail, then went to the pharmacy late night Wednesday and got Ora-jel – which worked (it numbs you so you can’t feel the pain) – for five to ten minutes MAXIMUM! And I could only apply the gel 4 times per day!!

I called in for an appointment on that Thursday on our way to Washington D.C. (more about that later) for that Friday. I got lucky I guess because the actual dentist picked up the phone and not the secretary so I was able to ask if I could apply the gel more frequently or if there was something else that would help. He said no to the gel, but told me to take aleve… and my goodness – it made such a big difference! Within ten or fifteen minutes of taking aleve, the toothache was substantially less and I was able to actually enjoy my day in D.C.

FYI – aleve is definitely a strong medicine because within a few minutes of me taking it I got dizzy and started sweating like crazy, but hey it did its job. As soon as the medicine wears off though, the pain is oh so strong.

Anyhow, we figured it was my wisdom tooth that was bothering me because of the location of the pain, but it turned that was only part of the problem – I needed a root canal on the tooth right next to my wisdom tooth. Of course, I freaked out – I don’t handle pain well at all! And we have all heard those horror root canal stories.

Fortunately, my experience was a lot better than I had imagined. Most of the pain subsided as soon as I was anesthetized for the root canal and the procedure itself was relatively pain free. I don’t know if I just got lucky (because we all know how nervous and how uptight I was about the pain I’d feel) or what, but I sure am glad it went so well.

I’m kinda glad it all happened at once amidst a very hectic time so I didn’t have time to read online about it all, and so I went in to the dentist office not having a false sense of what was to come.

I couldn’t go back for the second part of it until a week after the first part since Faraz and I were in Canada (more about that later too). Yesterday I went in for the second part – and for whatever reason – the left side of my face feels odd… can’t really explain it… and some of the pain (but very slight) is back. I go back Wednesday hopefully for the last time in a while… let’s see.

After all the time I spent avoiding the doctor’s/dentists office, the past week made up for it all.

This joke's a lot funnier now that the pain is considerably less, but when's the best time to visit the dentist? "Tooth hurty"... get it? 2:30! And that's exactly what I waited for.

 P.S. Don't forget to leave me a comment below on your thoughts! As always, I'd love to hear from you.