That Pesky Molar

For months now, I've been having trouble with a tooth, a molar on the right lower jaw. Biting down, I would often feel a sharp stab of pain. For a while, I pretended it wasn't a big deal. But at some point the words "root canal" took up residence in my head, and I went even further into denial. Because I am, to put it mildly, a great big chicken when it comes to dental work. But the stabs of pain kept coming; and then I started having a more or less constant taste of metal in my mouth.

Last August, I had a little filling done, and I worked up my courage and asked the dentist to take a look at that pesky molar. He said that it seemed an old silver filling was degrading, and that a little slot may have opened up through which a new cavity might be forming. I screwed my courage up a little further and asked whether it would need a root canal. "I don't expect so," he said--but then said further that he couldn't be sure till he drilled out the old filling and took a look.

And then, right there, he said that as long as he was doing the one little filling, he could go ahead and take care of the molar as well. I just couldn't do it. One filling (on the other side of the mouth) was bad enough; I simply couldn't handle any more that day. Knowing that it was stupid to let the problem linger, I let the problem linger.

Last night, Monday evening, I went back and dealt with it. All these months I kept trying to hold onto my dentist's assertion that he "didn't expect" my problem to require a root canal, but of course what I really obsessed over was his uncertainty on that score. Besides, having given the problem another six-plus months to get worse, even if it wasn't that bad before, surely it would be now. All through the weekend I kept a running countdown--not of the days and hours till the appointment was to begin, but of that moment when the appointment would be past. I can't think of a time when I have so longed for it to be Tuesday.

And after all that? It wasn't really a big deal. I asked my dentist (the marvelous Randall Gordon, DDS) to "numb the hell out of me." He injected me once with the novocaine and the effect was only so-so. "Really," I said to him. "I don't care if I can't eat till tomorrow." So he did two more injections, and then he went to work.

You know, every once in a while I lament that I was born in the wrong century. I should have been born during the Enlightement, when the world actually cared about learning and accomplishment. When Willoughby makes Kate Winslet's character swoon in Sense and Sensibility because he carries along a little volume of Shakespeare, I lament all over again that I was born in a time when that would just seem kinda gay. But whenever I go to the dentist, I exult in the wonders of the year 2006, and would not wish to be anywhere else. Novocaine, man, that's some of the best stuff on earth!

(Plumbing, too. Modern toilets and hot showers are pretty damn great.)

Dr. Gordon went at that tooth with a vengeance; drilled out the three fillings that had accumulated over the years, and replaced them with some material that is colored the same as my tooth, so it even looks better than it did. (That must be an L.A. thing, because I didn't ask for it, he just did it.) I walked home through the rain feeling completely thrilled--but also more than a little shocked that it really was over.

Turns out I really couldn't eat till the next day--by 10:00 p.m. the numbness had only just begun to subside, enough that I could manage some cottage cheese, and that was my dinner for the night. With the numbness gone there came some pain, because he really had been grinding away at that tooth for a while, but I took an Advil and went to bed and by morning it was mostly all better.

And now it's all done, and I have nothing more to worry about. Which only means this: now I will sit there dreading what the next thing will be. This is how a hypochondriac is born, isn't it?