Holey Teeth Batman!

You may remember a couple of months ago I posted about my fear of dentists and the fact that I had a large hole in one of my teeth. Click here for the full post.

Well last week the hole started niggling again. I did the usual with soluble aspirin and waited for it to go away again. It didn't. By Saturday it was so painful I had to start taking Paramol, which is Paracetamol (Acetaminophen for US readers) and Dihydrocodene. It's also the strongest painkiller you can get here in the UK without a prescription. By Monday even that wasn't working fully and I was advised that I could take Ibuprofen as well and to get myself to a dentist asap.

Well as per my previous post, I'm still not registered with a dentist so this morning I called the NHS direct helpline for details of an emergency dentist. I have to say that this helpline is very good and once they'd established that I wasn't on the verge of collapsing (and therefore in need of rather more immediate attention) I was given the information I needed and away I went. I called up the dental surgery and was given an appointment within half an hour.

The x-rayed my teeth just to be sure that the hole was as bad as it looked. I heard the words 'buckled tooth' being bandied about and was told that I had the option of a root canal filling, or an extraction. I went for the cheaper option of the extraction and that was when it got seriously unpleasant.

*** GORY DETAIL WARNING ***

Because the tooth had decayed so badly, when they started to try to pull it out the top came off leaving the root behind. So then they had to dig enough of the root out of my gum to enable them to get a grip with the pliers. I could feel them rotating it and it was coming loose, but every time they tried to pull on it, it didn't want to budge. She ended up having to get one of the male dentists in to get the final bits out. I'm guessing she just wasn't strong enough. As you can imagine I was in a right state by this point. I'd been shaking like a leaf from the start, now all I wanted to do was burst into tears and hide in a corner. The new guy came in and asked for some different tools and then started the wiggle and pull process again. He even had to drill one part to get it loose. Finally all the bits were out and I was told the reason for the difficulty had been that the root was twisted.

*** END OF GORY DETAIL ***

I was told to take the rest of the day off work and take it easy. So, I've spent most of the day on the sofa, watching DS9 on DVD and stitching. I slept for a couple of hours early this afternoon, I've not really been sleeping well the last few nights because of the pain so it was good to catch up a little.

It's working wonders for my diet too. All I’ve been able to eat since has been cup-a-soups. I tried a slice of bread and butter but it's a seeded loaf and I was constantly worrying that the seeds would get into the hole. I might try a bowl of noodles later.