Ouch!

My tooth broke on Friday night. To begin with, I thought it was a piece of bone in the corned beef, but next morning I found that a quarter of my back molar had vanish, and the bit of “bone” had been about that size and shape so…

 Well it wasn’t too bad living with it, but of course it needed attention. So I got an emergency appointment at the dentist. Seeing as I was being squeezed in, I had to wait an hour. Fair enough.

The moment the dentist started drilling (after the usual injection) it really HURT! This dentist has a system that if you need him to stop, you just hold up your hand. I tried to pull down a star. So he gave me another injection, and I waited a bit while he saw someone else, and we tried again. And the moment he started drilling, I tried to shove my hand through the ceiling again.

The dentist said, “I must be missing something. Let’s do an x-ray.” The Halloween gremlins had got into the computer, and it took three reboots to get it to talk to the x-ray machine. Then we took the x-ray and the dentist said, “Oh wow, that is deep. Look, the caries goes almost to the nerve. That’s why it hurts, and that will be why the tooth broke. I think I can save the nerve, but we might not be able to finish today.”

So this wound up with me having another two injections which weren’t quite enough. That is, I wasn’t trying to punch through the ceiling any more, but I was in (bearable) pain. So the dentist made most of his hole and said, “I can see you’re suffering, but I can’t give you any more anaesthetic – it’s not safe.” So he stuffed the hole with some sort of temporary paste which will deaden the nerve for the repeat performance next week. No kidding he couldn’t give me more anaesthetic. I felt slightly drunk (without the high, dammit) for hours. So by the time you add in the long wait before the drilling and the siesta afterwards, there wasn’t a whole lot of yesterday left. The paste was too big and I couldn’t chew at all until a chunk broke off. Today will be better. It doesn’t hurt and I can chew, as long as I’m careful.

Posted by sheila

Sheila came to La Palma with a six month contract and has stayed 24 years so far. She used to work as a software engineer at the observatory, but now she's a writer and Starlight guide.