You've probably heard someone say sarcastically, "That was as much fun as a root canal," or about their day, more seriously, "It wasn't as bad as a root canal."
That's the kind of day I had today. I had a root canal.
I was eating some popcorn at Tuesday night's Dallas Stars game when I crunched down on something hard and felt a quick, jarring pain in the upper right of my mouth.
"I might have broken a tooth on a kernel," I thought.
Then I spat out two small, hard things on to a napkin. One was a hard kernel. The other, about as big around but a bit longer, was part of a bicuspid.
So today when I went to the dentist, I found that I would need a temporary crown. And a root canal.
I'd had both before, sometimes when dentistry was less high-tech than it is now.
For example, McKinney Dentist has flat-screen TVs above every chair. When the dentist wasn't showing me the holes, decay and nerve in the affected today, the flat screen showed what looked like a tropical island, with rocky cliffs on either side of a sandy beach. That, I figured, was where the dentist will be going with the money I'll be paying for today.
That's not the first time I've thought that. A couple of decades ago, when my dentist gave me a partial bridge to replace one that had been there since I had parts of three teeth knocked out while playing hockey, he actually was going on a vacation to Jamaica or some other Caribbean island soon after.
Today's root canal really wasn't bad.
My greatest realization was that my mouth is like a TARDIS, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Here's why I know that. How else could the dentist fit in my mouth an instrument in each hand, along with something to prop my mouth open, some other rubber thingies to surround the tooth in question, as well as having his assistant rooting around in there with the hose, the leaf blower or the vacuum cleaner, whichever was needed at the time?
Ask yourself this, too. If you have a missing tooth, or a hole in a tooth, and you run your tongue over it, doesn't that feel about the size of a pothole that could swallow a Buick Enclave?
When the dental team started loading things into my pinhole, the dentist said to let him know if there was any problem. How could I possibly do that? I wondered from underneath the gas mask and hoses stretched across my cheeks.
My greatest concern was that I would forget some of these pithy observations that came to me while I was high on nitrous oxide.
I probably have, but that concern is why I'm writing all of this and not yet about baseball and my fantasy teams.
Back to the dentist and the tropical island. I had been feeling pretty good because two checks came in the mail today. That was before a woman from the business office brought me my bill. It was for nearly 10 times the total of the two checks. And I'd worked about three half-days for those; the dentist worked on me for barely two hours today.
Anyway, my time with the dentist, the anesthetic and the nitrous oxide was kind of a seehearsmelltouchtaste one, two, three, four, five senses working OverrTIME.
Well, the see and touch parts not so much. I could see past the stuff stuffed into my mouth, and I still can't feel anything on the right side of my face.
The hear part wasn't so good, because I could hear the drill grinding my tooth to dust even if I couldn't feel that. I could hear the dentist asking the assistant for various drill bits. The 19 and 20 didn't sound too bad. I wasn't sure about the 30, but I survived it.
The taste was worse. Even if it had tasted good, I still would have thought about how it was equal parts water from the hose, those specks of tooth dust and drippings of Novocaine or whatever anesthetic had been injected.
But the worst was the smell. That sense was working overtime on a Sunday holiday. The odor of burnt tooth is not pleasant. And it added to the unpleasant taste.
My next appointment, to put a permanent crown in place and to collect whatever money I haven't yet paid, will be in three weeks with a different dentist. At that time, I'll be envisioning the dentist who worked on me basking on that tropical island. See? Root canals aren't so bad for some people.
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