She's tried this once already, but the composite didn't stick. After looking at my busted toof, she tsk-tsk-ed and asked how I managed to break my farthest backmost molar.
"I had a rock in my broccoli from Whole Foods," I sighed. My buddy, Mark, said that I had a rockoli for lunch - I laughed a bittersweet laugh. It was funny but my tooth is still broken.
Anyway, yes I had a rock in my brocc and I think I swallowed the offending pebble. However, I managed to salvage something hard and white out of the mess in my mouth, but I think it's just part of the tooth. It's in a small, 3"x2" manila envelope and hopefully I'll be able to get Whole Foods to pay for my visits to Dr. Kay.
Anyway, my first visit wasn't without drama, but it's boring drama so I'll avoid it. Instead, I'll pick up with me in the dentist's chair, watching the hygienist bust open plastic packets of sterilized stainless steel tools in order to dump them in a clatter onto an aluminum tray. After all the tools were heaped onto the tray, she proceeded to scooch them around into a rough assemblage that I can only assume is Dr. Kay's preferred heap of instruments. The best part was the horse-sized needle that she loaded with numbing agent and stabbed through a piece of cardboard to prop it up on the tray. The industrial syringe looked exactly like this one:
. . . minus the istock watermark, of course. I wanted to snap a photo of it sitting on the tray, but two things happened at that moment.
1. My phone fainted at the sight (or at least, it ran out of batteries)
2. Dr. Kay informed me that she wasn't going to numb me for the procedure.
Ok, granted it was 5:30 and the office closes at 6, but that's no reason to cut corners, is it? We're talking about tooth nerves, after all. I grimaced and said, "you know, it hurt when you blew air on it just a second ago." I glanced at the drill as she affixed a conical bit and closed my eyes.
"Well, let's just see how you do," she said, altogether too pleasantly.
I paused. "Is that a challenge, Dr. Kay?" I asked.
"Perhaps," she replied, "Now open your mouth."
I complied, waiting for the moment when she would hit the nerve and my entire body would hit the ceiling. Surprisingly enough, though, that moment never came.
"I'm going to try to rebuild your tooth without removing more of the tooth," she explained. "Let's hope it holds. Otherwise, you'll have to come back in and we'll have to get serious."
Get serious. Hmmm. So this is the corner being cut, eh? I knew from my reading on dental repairs while I waited in the lobby that molars are exceptionally hard to fix due to the tremendous pressures exerted upon them during mastication.
Sure, I had hope that she would perform a miracle and it would hold, but the nagging voice of doubt in the back of my mind told me that I would be back. The process took twenty mostly-painless minutes and I left glad to be able to chew again.
The tooth broke again the next morning.
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via FoxyTunes
1 comment:
I want to know if your tooth, which broke a second time, needed a cap. Gold or porcelain? Or did the dentist decide you didn't need that tooth and pull it out. Don't leave us wondering.
Thanks, One whose birthday is this month...
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