Thursday, April 12, 2007

A Crowning Achievement

Today, Dr. Sturn did the root canal I talked about a couple of weeks ago. I assure you, I slept very little last night; instead, I lay there dreading this whole experience (I've never had a root canal procedure before, and I had heard bad things).

Truth is, Dr. Sturn made sure that it was no worse than an extensive cavity filling. He used two shots of novocaine rather than one--one in the gum and, a couple of minutes later, one at the base of the tooth for good measure. Since I had read up on the procedure to get some idea what to expect, I knew more or less what he was doing at each step. The removal of the nerve was totally painless; the cleaning of the root canal rattled my head a little when he did the drilling and filing (and that head-rattling always makes my scalp itch just above the ear on the affected side... weird...), but it never hurt.

Afterwards, he did the post and core procedure--the procedure that the charlatan "Dr. Crackers" had billed me for a few years ago when he prepared the original crown for my tooth. Of course, Dr. Crackers had never really installed a post at all... nor, for that matter, had he installed the crown properly, which is why I had to go through all of this today...

The worst part for me wasn't the part that I dreaded, but the three molds that Dr. Sturn made using that awful tasting purple rubber gunk (he wanted to be sure that he got the crown just perfect). I really hate sitting there tasting that awful stuff for the ten or so minutes that it takes to set up.

All done now. My jaw is a little stiff from the length of time that I had to keep my mouth open for all of this, but otherwise all is hunky-dory.

Yay, Dr. Sturn! I don't know how I lucked into such a great dentist, but I'm certainly glad about it!

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