It seems I am a dental impossibility.

[dalesql]

.  Went in to the dentist this afternoon for my other root canal.  He took xrays of the tooth, then took another to confirm. .  It seems that the roots of my tooth are "impossibly deep".  Said my roots were more than 40 mm deep, and twisty.   I suggested that I could go have it done at the dental school so all the baby dentists could see my impossibly deep roots.  

  He looked at the cavity, the x-rays, poked and prodded m teeth with tools and an ice cube,and said that doing the root canal would be extremely difficult, and since the cavity didn't seem to actually reach to the nerve, he might be able to just do a medicated filling.  I'm like, whatever seems like the best course.  do the filling, and see what happens in a couple months.  Or the root canal.  So, I said, give it a try.  So he did the filling.  And instead of 1300 bucks for the root canal, 300 bucks for the filling. 


Which is just as well, as my car broke down last night.  Turned out that the battery gave up the ghost.   Over a hundred bucks for the tow, plus 118 dollars for a replacement battery.  He said that mine was one of the less expensive ones.  The BMW batteries he had on the shelf were almost 300 bucks.

Oh well, checking account drained back down to small numbers by these fun and games.   But it could be worse, so I'm not gonna bitch and moan about it that much.  

Comments

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

More than 40 millimeters deep? Yowser I don't know how deep roots usually go, but more than 1.5 inches certainly does seem "impossibly deep."

Yay for another medicated filling. I hope it does the trick! Sorry about your car expenses.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

He was the same guy I had do a root canal a couple years ago. He remembered doing that one too. He was going soooo deep with those roots on that one, he was worried that he was getting way closer to my eyeball than he was comfortable with. the note on my record from that one (My regular dentist showed it to me later) "wicked long roots"

[scootersquirrel.livejournal.com]

Hope that does the trick and he got all of it with the filling. I had a filling once get an abcess below it. You want to talk about pain! Of course it happened on the weekend and after going through a crap load of orajel and ice, the root canal that Monday felt good! Hope you don't have to go through that.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

that's what happened to this one. had an old filling that got rot going underneath it for a while before the filling fell out. wasn't giving me any pain, I didn't really notice it until it started to turn black. Called my regular dentist and she got me in and basically decided it was way too close to the nerve to try a filling, so go for the root canal andcrown thing. My regular dentist is a small practice, Just her and one assistant. She doesn't do the more specialized stuff. So she sent me to the root canal place, where they have several dentists and medical assistants and could deal with the complications if encountered.

[xyzzysqrl]

It must be awfully unnerving to know you don't exist!