Root Canal, Take Two

This morning I suffered through the second half of my second root canal. Last week? Easy peasy. This morning? Not so much. My gums are REALLY sore right now, because it took him SIX TIMES to get the clamp around my tooth. They are shredded right now because every time I swallowed the clamp would scrape my gums even more.

Add on to that that I requested that he NOT give me five shots of anesthetic like last week, so that I’d be able to function at work. He gave me TWO shots this time, but then opened up the tooth and shot the tooth full of local anesthetic as well. A few times.

But. And this is a big butt. I still felt jabs of pain. The reason, as he explained to me after-the-fact, is that two of the roots rest against my jawbone. Jawbones done become numb by anesthetic. But they do still feel pressure that feels like pain. So when he was working on those two particular roots, I kept feelin these pinpricks of pain when he’d get to the bottom of the root were it rested against the jawbone. And I’d flinched, causing my swallow reflex to activate, causing the clamp around my gums to move and scrape my gums. So it was a never-ending cycle of pressure, flinch, swallow, scrape. Miserable.

When he was done he took an x-ray of the tooth and that’s when he showed me the roots resting against the jawbone and explained why I felt pain. He also said that because of the way my roots rest, it’s quite possible I’ll feel even more pain than I did after the last root canal, since the other tooth had shorter roots that didn’t rub against any bone.

Great.

So I’m here at work, with a sore mouth (and jaw – but thank HEAVENS he didn’t put that clamp in my mouth that forced it open an ungodly amount). I can tell that the local anesthetic is starting to wear off, so I’m going to take two Tylenol and begin praying that this is as bad as it gets. We’ll see.