What a root canal might feel like

OK so I had a “classic root canal” last week. If you’re wondering what a root canal is like, here is my story, but it might be different from yours.

I had a filling that cracked and had to be re-done several times, making the hole so deep that a root canal was inevitable. After a weekend of mind-numbing pain (which I thought was a hangover headache but turned out to be tooth related), I woke on a Tuesday morning in so much pain I literally couldn’t think or problem solve. My dear Jack woke up, struggling to think himself, and finally issued the wise decree, “Go to the Dentist.” So off I went; I was so uncomfortable that what follows was by comparison not nearly as painful.

After anesthetizing (injection high in the gum area), the dentist put this cool rubber ring thing around the tooth to keep all the yuck out of my mouth while they worked. It was hard for me to see around it. He drilled out the filling very quickly, and then used these funny, flexy, wirey thingies to scrub the nerve tissue out of the root canals in my tooth. He showed me an Xray of my tooth (a molar) where there are 3 canals of nerves. These have to be cleaned out and packed with strands of some kind of inert, pink material whose name escapes me. That means I have no more nerve there and its basically a tooth root, on top of which they will overlay a nice, shiny, indestructable crown (once its healed). So after much vigorous scrubbing and some minor drilling that felt like it was in my brain, the new canals were filled with the pink filaments and then a flat, white filling was packed in over the whole shebang to “build up” my tooth to house the eventual crown. The weirdest part was the scrubbing. I see the dentist’s delicate little tweezers go back and forth, getting different size “scrubber” thingys, and then there would be a rubbing sound and I’d feel a little shooken, and then spraying cold water and vaccuming it out, and repeat. This took a long time, maybe 35 minutes. I felt bad for the dentist, it seems like a lot of work. The hygienist put little props up when my jaw got tired so I didn’t have to hold it open any more. I felt like I had 4 hands deep in my head sometimes, scrubbing and rinsing and drilling. The drilling was the second-weirdest, since its so deep in the tooth. I think it is just to thoroughly clean out the root canal and prep the surface for the new synthetic packing material. The drill tips were very small and all the drilling was very short and not that scary “big scrapey” sound you hear sometimes when you’re getting a filling.

So once the area was packed and the “crown buildup” filling was done, then the dentist smoothed the area and I was suddenly done. My mouth was tired and I felt kind of light-headed, but I went to work anyways. As the anesthetic wore off, I could feel my weird, half-finished tooth, all sharp on the edges and flat and kind of grainy across the molar surface. I kind of felt like I’d had major surgery in my mouth, like when I had my wisdom teeth removed. Later on the pain continued, only because I was really messed up and so I had to go on antibiotics. But at least I could think. Yay Ibuprofen!

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