The Lighter Side Of My Root Canal

Admittedly, in this imperfect world, there is no lighter side to a root canal. But in order to survive mine, I feel a need to excuse myself from the reality of it all.

A few fellow cowards of my acquaintance prefer to be completely removed from reality and use nitrous oxide...laughing gas. A very stoic, very few others, meditate and work through the pain. This class of patient would never be counted among the cowards. I call this group the idiots. Me? Knowing full well the wonders of modern dentistry, I take the chicken way, seemingly the scariest way out...Novocaine. Novocaine, a long-since proven local anesthetic, itself isn't too scary...no, not at all. But that damned needle is terrifying. Still, the bottom line is, overall, it's far and away the least horrific.

In truth, both the excruciating pain and the terror are short lived. With Novocaine, one soon feels nothing. My dentist could go in through the cheek and I wouldn't feel it. (And for all I know, he has.) But a root canal. The very phrase will strike fear deep in the soul of even the most heroic Navy Seal.

In my case, the root canal wasn't the problem. I'd already suffered through it eight months ago. After a time that long, spent in therapy to erase the memory, I finally felt that I had put the horror behind me. Then I got a toothache. Worse. It seemed to be the dead one.

As it happened, the arrival of the toothache more-or-less coincided with my thrice yearly cleaning. I mentioned it to the dentist when he came in to check his hygienist's work. It was as though I had had a coronary right there in the chair. He instantly ordered a full set of x-rays and jacked my mouth open with something that resembled the jaws of life. I wanted to protest, but all that came out was "Ghach!"

It was over in minutes. The verdict? My dead tooth had become infected. He was going to have to go back in. But first, I needed to go on an antibiotic for ten days.

The assistant raised the chair. I was directed to rinse in the sink, handed a plastic bag of tooth cleaning samples and sent on my way with an unreadable prescription and an appointment for ten days hence.

I took the prescription to my local pharmacy and was a bit shaken when the pharmacist said"

"An antibiotic?"

I didn't know if he was just curious about why, or if he was asking because he couldn't read it either.

"You tell me!"

"Oh no," he replied. "I can read it. It's Clindamypimicyniminicenen."

At least that's what it sounded like. All I really got from that conversation was that it was strong stuff. What I later picked up was 30 gigantic caplets of the generic version, squeezed into what seemed like a 5 gallon Sparklett's bottle. The phrase, "Choke a horse," kept running through my mind. And the name. It could've tongue tied a Giraffe. I think it read Claptimindrolongicin. It was a bit hard to see because there were so many words squeezed into the bottom two lines of the label that most of the letters printed over each other. The important line was clear however. It read:

"Take one by mouth, three times daily." Thank God. They could've been suppositories. The instructions also said to take the pills with lots of water. Well boy howdy! Those suckers were not going to go down with just a little sip.

Now usually, these broad-spectrum antibiotics tend to mess with my system in ways I feel need no discussion here. And sadly, this batch was no exception. Let's just say I spent the next nine days in close proximity to men's rooms. I was forced to make as many as five trips a day. I considered this a blessing...better than usual.

At the end of the ten days, I had made an early appointment for the re-opening of my dead tooth's final resting place. It was so early, that the dentist's assistant, delayed in heavy traffic hadn't even made it to the office.

I entered the darkened lobby, and peered down the labyrinthine halls. All the rooms were dark, save one at the end, from which horrible moans and screams emanated to the strains of "Satisfaction." As the screams died away, a hulking figure in a surgical mask emerged from the room. It spoke in a distinctly Carpathian dialect, it's voice resonating menacingly down the hall in my direction.

"Ah. Meester Weinstein. Velcome. Pardon the darkness of the hallvays. The rest of mein shtaff haff not arrived as yet and I don't know vere all the svitches are. Please, come this vay. I shall put you in room two."

Okay. Maybe my imagination was getting the better of me there. The man was from Thousand Oaks. But I swear it was spooky.

He settled me into room two, a foreboding cavern filled with machines straight out of the 1931 version of Frankenstein. He instructed...no, commanded me to relax while he finished up with the patient in room one. No more sounds came from the other room until I heard a loud thump, like the sound of a side of beef hitting the floor. Then, there was this scraping noise...as though someone was dragging something, maybe as big as a body. I laughed at myself. I knew it was my imagination. But the noise got the better of my curiosity and turning to see what was behind me, I glimpsed what looked suspiciously like the last few inches of a lawn and leaf bag disappearing along he floor, past the doorway.

Presently, the dentist re-entered in the room, wiping something red from his hands with a golf towel. He told me that first he wanted to get another x-ray to see how much of the infection I still might have. He then jammed this gadget into my mouth, telling me it was to hold the x-ray film. It looked like it was designed to pinch off the circulation in a dog's groin. It felt worse than that.

Walking over to the console that controlled the x-ray machine, he began twiddling dials in a seemingly random fashion. I began to ask him why the controls weren't preset at the factory, but the groin-grabber hurt when I tried to move my mouth. So, being a pragmatic sort, I decided he was the doctor and he knew what he was doing and I had better calm down and let him do his job.

Then he turned to a box, from which protruded a cone-shaped tube. This particular torture device was mounted on a menacing-looking scissors arm, attached to a metal beam on the wall. It looked like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe novel...with a cannon on the end.

He lifted the thing from its berth on the wall and aimed the cone squarely at my cheek. Then he picked up a lead-lined, leather chest protector and put it on himself. I wanted to say:

"Shouldn't I be wearing that?"

But the x-ray film digging into the side of my tongue made it come out like: "Hounher?"

He clipped a napkin around my neck with an alligator clip chain and stepped from the room. I heard a click and a benign buzz. I wanted to feel re-assured, but glancing left, I could swear that my entire jaw was momentarily projected on the far wall of the room. Then, it was over. He came back in, hung up the chest-protector and with a little maneuver that is best described as inhumane, removed the film from my mouth. Then he disappeared into the bowels of the office as silently as the Tooth Fairy...the bad one. Minutes later, he returned and triumphantly announced that he had cured the infection. I don't know what he meant by that. I was the one who had to valiantly shove pills the size of mangoes down my throat thrice daily. Still, the upshot was that I was healthy enough to be drilled out. But first I had to be numbed.

"But isn't my tooth already dead? Isn't the root gone? Why do I need to be numbed."

"I expect to go deeper than man has ever gone before. I just want to save you the discomfort, if I...shall we say...strike a nerve?"

Then he cackled a most unnerving cackle. I was very afraid, but weighing the pain of the needle against the hellfire of deep exploration, I chose the former.

First, he did something unexpected. he soaked a cotton swab in some tasty fluid and stuck it into my mouth next to the infected area.

"Tastes like licorice doc. What is it?"

"Oh it's just some Aniset...to numb your gums so the needle won't hurt much. We'll give it a minute or two." Then he left the room.

Much. The word cut like a machete through over-ripe sugar cane. And Aniset? No doubt some kind of slow-acting poison. I'd probably be the next lawn and leaf bag dragged away.

A minute or two later, I realized I had no tongue. The fiend had removed it while I wasn't looking. I'd have given him a severe tongue lashing about it, but, well you know.

It must have been a side-effect of the Aniset. It made me complacent. He had me open my mouth, and I complied with no argument. Of course, any arguments would have sounded like: "Grouhungh."

I felt a sharp pain that ran from my ankles to my ear-lobes. Then after a moment, another. But this one stretched only from my knees to my carotid artery. Then I discovered that I no longer had a face. I felt nothing...nothing at all. It was as though I had died and gone to anesthesia heaven. And my heart filled with the warm afterglow of having survived the shots. I would never, ever feel pain again. I just knew it. But I would know fear!

In my mellowed out state, I didn't even care that he had picked up a tool designed for tree root removal from four inch drain lines. It was a slow-moving device that made a sound inside my head like nails scraping on a chalkboard from within.

Oddly, between the rounds of drilling, I discovered that I had regained the power of speech. Though just as the pharmacist was the only one who could read the prescription, only the dentist could understand me. I couldn't even understand me. I just knew what I was going to say. It all came out like. "Fluhingterumblip."

At one point, I guess to show that he could be regular guy, the dentist began to tell me about an old Carol Burnett show skit, in which Tim Conway was a hysterical apprentice dentist who kept accidentally injecting himself with Novocaine. I remembered it, and politely asked that he not drill until he stopped laughing. His laugh was infectious, despite the antibiotic and I soon found myself chortling and drooling all over the napkin on my chest.

Soon, all laughed out, he began drilling again in earnest. He kept stopping to see if he'd gotten all the old filling out, but it was being stubborn. He kept switching to increasingly wider drill bits. Finally, he got one that could've dug the Chunnel. He said: "I just need to make it a bit wider."

I replied in my dentally challenged way: "Any wider and ships could pass through it."

A bit more drilling. Then, a probe was dispatched down into the tooth, along a main artery and finally, with a mighty tug, the last plug of filling was popped from somewhere near my heel.

All that remained was for some medicine, a temporary filling and I could go home.

I asked him what the medicine was and he told me it was formaldehyde.

"Isn't that what they preserve dead bodies with?"

"Your tooth is dead."

"But..."

"It won't kill you. It'll just kill any lingering infection."

"Are you sure? Because as I see it, killing me will also kill the infection."

"True. But killing you won't pay the patient portion of my bill."

For some reason, I felt much better. He squirted enough formaldehyde into my tooth to preserve my entire torso. Then, he mixed up a batch of this rubbery goo to fill the tooth.

By now, Igor, his assistant and Brunhilda, the receptionist had arrived and the lights came on all over the office. He took the napkin away and told me to go to the sink and rinse. I still couldn't feel anything, and kept looking in the mirror to see if I actually had a mouth.

Satisfied that all the obvious parts were intact, I rinsed and drooled, rinsed and drooled and pretty soon felt much better. A tiny bit of feeling was beginning to return to my face. Unfortunately, the feeling was a phantom itch. In the next half hour, I nearly clawed off my chin trying to get at an itch that couldn't be scratched.

As I re-entered the hallway, I saw the streaks lining his decorator wall-coverings. I couldn't detect a pattern repeat so indicative of wallpaper. And it was blood red! I thought of that poor soul who had the appointment before me. There but for the grace of God...

I left the office quickly and went straight to Starbucks for a double cap. It felt good going down, that which made it past the dead pieces of chicken liver posing as my lips. When I got to work, I had drooled away more than half a vente. I guess I just had a single cap in all. But now, the feeling in my face had pretty much returned. My jaw hurt again and my chin was nearly bloody and raw.

I walked into the office. Our receptionist took one look at me and said: "How'd the dental appointment go?"

I was about to ask her how she knew. But I quickly realized that I had drooled half a cup of coffee on my shirt and my face looked like it had been etched with acid.

"Pretty well."

"Well. Do you have another one? I can put it in the book and remind you about it like I did this one. Oh. And did you know you spilled coffee on your shirt?"

I mumbled something like a yes and handed her my appointment card. I had a week to prepare.
That night, I examined my mouth in the bathroom mirror. When I was satisfied that I had survived the procedure for now. I flicked off the bathroom light. My head glowed.