• 11:35 PM
  A man, a plan, a root canal

All right, I made it to my early morning root canal, which turned into a lunchtime root canal. 3 hours at the endodontist. This is the same endodontist I consulted with (and nothing more) 2 years ago to see if my ailingest tooth at the time was saveable. She remembered, and asked about it, and I showed her the empty parking place in my mouth where it used to live.

This being my first actual operation by the new doctor, I was a little nervous it would go the way of my last procedure in the medical-dental building. In the commonwealth, they would say it went "pear shaped". Bad. This time was entirely the opposite. Since she was a specialist, she was very well experienced and equipped for this exact procedure. It went surprisingly smoothly, especially considering that it was on a tooth far back in my mouth, at a strange angle.

The new gear I saw included:

Digital X-Rays

I didn't even know this was possible. I got a big clunky digital sensor in my mouth, about the size of a CompactFlash memory card. The technician put the ray tube up against my mouth, hit the button ("gleep!") and a picture of the insides of my tooth showed up on the screen next to me. Cool! And it wasn't like the X-Rays I'm used to seeing, basically life sized images that need to be peered at through magnifiers. This was a big honkin tooth in high res, a foot high. I kind of want a copy of them, make a fun desktop. Or, cell phone graphic... T-shirts on cafepress..

Funny note: the X-Ray display machine was a windows machine, and the X-Ray software crashed, requiring a reboot. I'm presuming that any radiation release mechanisms are controlled by failsafe medical grade logic, since Windows XP is specifically contraindicated for use in realtime situations.

Root Depth Sensor

When my general dentist does a root canal, he has to take X-Rays right in the middle of everything to check how long my roots are and whether the root files are long enough/too long to clean them out all the way. He uses regular film X-Rays so that introduces a considerable delay.

The new fangled way to do it is with a sensor doodad which sits on one side of my mouth, while a probe goes into each canal in turn. When it hits the end, some kind of circuit is completed and the doctor marks off how far in it went. It beeps! She went out of her way to warn me of this. "I'm going to put an instrument on the side of your mouth. It's going to beep."

Root File Ring

In the course of performing a root canal, the endodontist has to choose and switch between a boggling array of root files (I don't know what they're called, but they're used for filing the crap out of your root canals). This could have been very inefficient and would have wasted time as the doctor looked over to select the correct file out of a forest of a hundred, then resituated to the treacherous terrain inside my mouth.

This process was optimized through use of what looked like one of those candy ring-pop platforms, but substitute the candy with a dense spongy material loaded up with rows and rows of files. So when it was file-changing time, she just poked the current one into the sponge, and drew a new one right off the back of her hand. I was impressed - that must be something right out of The Sharper Endodontist Image.

Anyway, the root cleaning part went really quickly. What took a lot of time was the post and buildup (yay, I get another titanium post!). The buildup was a mammoth filling, basically the size and shape of an entire tooth. When the doctor took off the surrounding form, she was reminded of unwrapping a cheesecake from its springform pan. "I should've just used the thumb trick," she commented. "That's when you take the whole spill and just squash it in there with your thumb." As far as I have come to know, the "spill" is the batch of filling mixture, which is then put into little applicators (which have a "big end" and a "small end" which hold different amounts of fill stuff).

Right in the middle of my procedure, who should pop his head around the partition but Helen's dentist! In a bizarre coincidence, he's the next door office neighbor of my endodontist, and came over to visit and pick up root canal techniques.

I'm not supposed to eat on that tooth for 24 hours at least, since it is such a big and precarious filling, but I don't think I've eaten on that tooth for 24 months, so no big deal there. The worst part of the whole thing was neck cramps from looking up so much, and pulling my hair on the chair for 3 hours. Ow.