root canal

38 years old, never needed braces, never had a cavity, regular visits for teeth cleaning have always been freighted with compliments from the dentist on what good shape my teeth are in. You can imagine what kind of a helter skelter year I've had from the fact that I haven't been to the dentist in all that time and managed to develop a problem requiring a root canal.

For you folks who haven't heard from me in quite some time and think I'm taking it easy and am just too lazy to e-mail you -- you're not the only ones whom I'm neglecting, I'm also neglecting my own body! And I really need my body!

Friday after work I went to see my new dentist, Dr. Chan of Healthy Smile Family Dentistry on Fair Oaks in South Pasadena. To make a long story short, he did the first part of my root canal on Friday night and stage two on Saturday morning.

The happy smile news is that it was a painless experience. They pumped a load of anesthetic into my gum and all the nerves were shut down in the lower right quadrant of my face until about 10 p.m. Whenever I touched my cheek or my chin it felt like a hunk of somebody else's face had been grafted onto mine, and it felt like the face of a huge person. The worst part of the procedure was that when he started drilling into the nerve of my sick tooth it smelled like burnt hair.

It's been over a year since I've been plugged into heavy duty antibiotics and once again I am grateful to have them. I also had pain medication prescribed but never friggin' needed it! That's what I'm talkin' about. As Dr. Chan was drilling away at the old fellow who was my tooth, sawing off slabs of gum, I was thinking to myself, "This is my kind of twenty-first century technology, what a root canal should be like. The only way this could be easier is if it could be done by phone."

The only truly painful part of this story is that Dr. Chan hit me for $244 on Friday night and $231 on Saturday morning, all out of my own pocket. And the hits keep coming, he's still got to install the permanent crown (they were wondering if I would be interested in a designer model for $900; I'll take generic). So I've got this blocky, robotic, temporary crown for three weeks, looks like a tiny hippopatamus tooth. When Dr. Chan gets back from wherever he's going, probably the Bahamas, he'll finish the job and then we'll make an appointment for a regular teeth cleaning. In the meantime I can only eat soft foods, let me know if you have any suggestions.

In other news, Nicole begins her third week of disability tomorrow. Her heart medication is giving her awful side effects including near constant anxiety. I think we've been to every emergency room in the area several times. Many of our moving boxes are unpacked but we're still using paper plates and plastic utensils because we can't find where we packed the real ones.

I will end on a positive note - the New Beverly Cinema is, apparently, not closing after all. Thank Heavens. Now I just gotta find the time to go watch a movie there. For now, Nicole and I are cheering ourselves up by watching the all-day "Ice Road Truckers" marathon on the History Channel.