January 10th, 2010:

I have decided that 10am on a Monday morning is definitely not when you want to schedule a root canal.  It just seems to start the week off on a painful note.

Nonetheless, that is how I just spent the last hour of my life – having a Korean man with small hands rooting (no pun intended) around in my mouth, fortunately his hands were small and my mouth is quite large, which alone probably increased the comfort factor of this entire thing by 2.  It started with radiation exposure, then some poking, prodding and Novocain (or whatever drug is currently in fashion with dentists to give me that puffy “I have just been punched in the face” look).  After that I was left in the chair for 10 minutes for the drugs to kick in, but I just used the time to snap a few pictures. I think the dental technician was quite amused with the picture taking, although she did ask if I was a professional photographer because her sister is getting married. I passed her a business card, so some good may come out of this pain yet.

Dr. Mo returned, fired up the drill, then I watched in horror as bits of teeth and saliva splattered against the plastic face shield he wore, my fingers clenching the armrests of the tan dental chair, as a hole was bored through the back of my front tooth all the way to the roots.   All the while that sucking thing, which makes such an awful sound, just kept sucking.

After quite an excessive amount of drilling and sucking, I was exposed to more radiation by the dental tech, then Dr. Mo came back to jam all kind of things into the hole he had just created.  After an undeterminable amount of time shoving, ramming, digging, prying and wrenching on what had to have been the world’s most difficult root canal, they brought out some other crazy tool (that I didn’t get a good look at) which created a burning, sulfur smelling, smoke  that rose from my mouth amidst the bits of tooth and saliva.

The Dr. smiled, said “Good Job.” and was gone.   Leaving me with a puffy face, a $525 bill, and a bottle of painkillers.