I sincerely meant to get right back to all of you about this, but that Kanye West thing I saw during the SNL 40th totally fucked me up.  I mean I actually had nightmares about it.  I basically withdrew from society for three days.  Pulled all my window shades down and locked myself in my house.  I didn’t answer the phone, let alone touch my keyboard.  Things were just more or less frozen in time during that stretch.  You know, the woodwork and some other flat surfaces around the house seemed to have collected more dust than usual too.  Maybe I just never noticed it before. I guess I should pay more attention.   Anyway, thanks to all of you who sent the get-well cards, emails. and what a touching blog comment from Vinnie “the Shiv” Gallo.  I really appreciate your suggestion, but I didn’t need to remove a bullet from my jaw.  It was just a toothache.

In the end I didn’t go through with it, the pulling my own tooth thing.  I chickened out.  But in the end I came to the conclusion I just might have been able to pull it off.  I chickened out because I lost faith in the tools I had available to me, and I am too cheap to spend any more money on another tool.  I have all these tools around and anymore I am hardly using any of them.  But in the end, as I glanced at the tools my assigned oral surgeon had aligned neatly on the tray that was perched no more than a foot and a half in front of my face, I noticed very quickly that they really didn’t look a whole lot different than the ones I had selected from my work-shop (see picture in previous self-help dental post), but in the almost-end had also considered inadequate.

The end all began after I called my dentist and told him that his hopeful solution to my dental pain turned out to be a very hopeless exercise in futility.  From my disjointed conversation with him that was broken by pauses of gasping moans he seemed to grasp the fact that I was still in serious pain, and offered the professional courtesy of securing an appointment with an endodontist for me.  Apparently someone in the  endodontic field of practice is the specialist your dentist will pass you along to after he gives up trying.   I had to tough it out for another 24 hours, but that visit reestablished my faith in health care in this great country.  That dude had some really genuine state of the art equipment.  First off, there was this magnifying apparatus that he peered through.  From my  vantage point prone in the dental chair, he looked like he was observing action via a pair of night vision goggles, but the business end revealed two cracks in my tooth that were imperceptible on X-rays.  One of them was so astonishingly unique my endodontist excitedly instructed his assistant to take a peek at it herself.  Apparently this crack was the dental equivalent of a  new astrophysical discovery.  These two professionals were beside themselves with joy.  I would have liked to have called their attention to the fact that as far as I was concerned they were on the clock, but that’s hard to do when you have your mouth locked wide open with a dental dam.

That, I would have to say, was the most enlightening event of the visit for me.  I had never  been introduced to the legitimate use of the dental dam.  The vague knowledge I had of that thing previously involved ribald tales told to me by some of my more questionably worldly but nonetheless safety conscious acquaintances.  You’ll just have to google the term to see what I’m talking about.  I don’t want to gross you out.  Just be aware in case your endodontist ever asks you if you’ve ever heard of a dental dam. You don’t want to blurt out an answer that reveals a seamy side to your character.   I have to admit I was impressed with its effectiveness.  It eliminated a lot of the gagging on flying dental debris I have often encountered during a cavity filling.

After reaming out everything my dentist had installed in that tooth and exposing its cracks, my endodontisst gave me the bad news that the tooth was irreparable and would have to come out.  In the way of even worse news,  he also informed me endodontists don’t perform extractions.  As was the case with my dentist, he made the accommodation of handing me off to the next dental professional, the oral/maxillofacial surgeon.

Of course that appointment could not be secured until the following day,  On the positive side, all the drilling down from this last procedure at least enabled the putrid infectious material that was causing my intermittent but jarringly intense pain to drain away.  At that point the form of pain I was enduring was simply a constant ache.  So I knew I was nearing the end of my ordeal.  And thanks to all the grinding and chipping and extracting bits and pieces of my tooth by my oral surgeon, the end became a reality.  Thanks for your concern.