The Great Dental Debacle
It all started about two years ago at a dental appointment: "Did you hit your front tooth on something?" Not that I can remember. "Well, it's cracked, and the root inside has died. You're going to need a root canal for that sooner or later, or you risk an infection and an abcess tooth."
Every time I've visited the dentist since then, they insist on putting liquid nitrogen (I assume that's what it is — it's insanely cold) first on that tooth, and then a neighbouring tooth, to prove just how dead it is.
So after my last cleaning and checkup a couple of weeks ago, I finally took the plunge. "Okay, fine. You can do the root canal. Just tell me what I'm supposed to do."
I'd never had a root canal. I'd always heard bad things about them. You know, people wouldn't facetiously say things like "I'd rather have a root canal" if root canals were especially pleasant, because that wouldn't make any sense. I mean, imagine asking someone if they're looking forward to work on Monday, and they say, "I'd rather have ice cream." Um, okay, so does that mean you want to go to work or not? You never know. But if they'd rather have a root canal, you can be pretty damn certain they're not in the mood to work.
And I was pretty damn certain I wasn't in the mood for a root canal.
Nevertheless, at Friday at 4pm, I was scheduled for my root canal. They called me on Wednesday to remind me. They called me again on Thursday to remind me. They called me Friday morning to confirm again. Maybe it was my tone of voice, but for whatever reason they really thought I was going to get cold feet about this situation.
Friday at 4pm rolled around, and I dragged myself up onto the dentist's chair. "I'm a little worried about this," I told them. "I've never had one of these before"
"It'll be fine," they answered. "Root canals actually have sort of a bad reputation, and they're not so bad. Pretty quick and painless. Besides, that tooth is dead, so you're really not going to feel a thing." Hmmm.
But you know what? Forty minutes later, it was done. All over. And I didn't feel a thing. It was great. If you could say that about a root canal. But it did seem great. Well, until then it was great. After that was when things started going off course.
"We're going to put a temporary crown on the tooth now, and then you need to book an appointment to come back for the permanent crown," they told me.
"I thought I'd asked to do it all at once?" I asked.
"Yes, we're doing the temporary crown today in this visit, where most people want to rest and do it separately, but you still have to book a followup visit for the permanent crown."
Sigh. I started to clue in that this was becoming a much more complicated set of plans than I had anticipated. By the time I left the dentist's office, I had two more visits in store for me:
1. A stop by the dental lab in Coquitlam to match the crown colour with my other teeth, important since it was a front tooth. "You don't need to make an appointment or anything," the dentist said. "Just call them when you're on your way. Go as early as you can so as not to delay the process. Saturday, if you can."
2. A return visit the following Saturday for the crown fitting.
These were in addition to the two visits I'd just had for the cleaning and the root canal itself. This was also before two more things happened.
1. I called the lab first thing Saturday morning to make sure they were open. Automated message: "Our office hours are 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday." Great. I guess I'm going to have to miss work Monday to do this. They totally didn't give me the right information on this one. Jerks.
2. Later that day on Saturday my phone rang. "Hi, it's ****** at ****** Dental Clinic. Um, we messed up your impression and need you to come back to redo it." Uh, what?!? "Yeah, we can't get the permanent crown made until we get this right." I told them I supposed I could drop what I was doing and swing by there in an hour or two, and they agreed I could come by around 5pm that afternoon. No big deal. Until they called me back again: "No, the dentist says it's actually going to take an hour or more to redo this, so we'll have to delay until next Saturday, which is the earliest we can work you in. Will that work for you?" I asked, since it was their mistake, if they might be more flexible. "No." But what about my existing appointment on Friday? "We can't make the crown until after the impression, so that's going to be delayed about a week."
"Man, how could this get any worse?" I thought to myself. Trust me, when it comes to dentists, don't ever tempt fate by asking that. Really. Don't.
Because two hours later, while I was munching on one of the goodies at a party we'd gone to, I noticed that my cheese was suddenly . . . crunchy. Why, you might ask? Because I was now chewing up my temporary crown. That's right — barely a day after they'd installed the thing, and it was disintegrating. And unless I could at least get the pieces back in, I was going to look like a toothless pirate until they could fix it.
The good news is that I was able to sort of smash the big part of it back in place so that no one could really tell anything was amiss.
The bad news is that the crown was basically being held in place by the power of prayer, and I couldn't eat anything for the rest of the party. I hadn't had any dinner. I was starving.
I called the dentist's office first thing in the morning, and they agreed to take me for an emergency repair at 2:30pm. I barely ate breakfast (just a small bowl of congee), all the while being super careful that nothing hard and pointy felt like it was going down my throat. I didn't even bother with lunch. Every time my stomach growled, I could feel the loose crown vibrating sympathetically against my gums.
After I sat down in the chair for the third time in so many days, the dentist (a different one, since mine was off for Sunday) was shocked when the loose crown rolled off into her hand. Then I was shocked when she dropped it onto the floor, and started crawling around trying to figure out where it had rolled off to. I didn't know if they had planned to repair the thing or make a new one, but now, after she pulled the fuzzy thing out from under the X-ray machine, I was pretty damn sure they'd better have a new one in the works.
They indeed made a replacement temporary crown. A better one than the first one, I could tell immediately.
And then I had an idea how to make this whole thing just a little more efficient. "By the way. As long as I'm here anyway, can you guys go ahead and redo the botched impression?"
"No."
"Um, please? I really don't have time to keep coming back here every time you guys screw something up."
"How was your root canal?"
"Excuse me?"
"How was the root canal, Friday? Fairly painless?"
Wait just a minute. Were they trying to emotionally blackmail me into admitting that because the root canal itself wasn't that bad, I had no right to complain about the circus which had transpired ever since then? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I think they were.
I at least shamed them into moving the redo-the-impression visit up to Tuesday (meaning I would miss plans with some friends, but hopefully end this whole ordeal a few days sooner vs. if I didn't come back until Saturday). Sigh.
Fast forward to 9am this morning. I walked into the lab to do the colour match. This is now dental-related visit #4, counting the original cleaning/checkup.
"I'm sorry sir, do you have an appointment?"
Blink. Blink. But wait, the dentist told me I didn't . . . oh. Damn. Yep, here we go again.
The people at the lab were pretty good natured, and took me in anyway since the mixup really wasn't my fault, but I couldn't believe how this was going. Now I really started to feel like both I and my insurance company deserved some of our money back. Seriously.
Anyway, here it is, Monday night, and I've got my fairly ugly but at least still intact replacement temporary crown, and presumably a correct colour match done sitting in a file somewhere. And tomorrow night, hopefully, fingers crossed, touch wood, no-jinx, I'll have an impression made that they can successfully make a permanent crown from.
And it's only taken five slices of my life to get that done.
And then at least one more appointment after that (not even made yet) to truly get it finished up. This permanent crown better . . . hell, I don't know . . . but it had better grant freaking wishes, or shoot lasers, or sparkle every time I say something clever, or, heck, at least carve vegetables into cool little Japanese shapes while I chew them — after as much trouble as all this has been, anyway.
* * *
To be fair, I can't say there's not a silver lining to all this. This morning, as I was getting ready for work, I noticed my pants seemed loose. I stepped on the scale.
"Hey. I lost six pounds this weekend!"
"Six pounds?!? I guess because you barely ate anything? Man, I'm jealous. I wish I could do that."
"Sure you can. Let me look up my dentist's phone number...."
Every time I've visited the dentist since then, they insist on putting liquid nitrogen (I assume that's what it is — it's insanely cold) first on that tooth, and then a neighbouring tooth, to prove just how dead it is.
So after my last cleaning and checkup a couple of weeks ago, I finally took the plunge. "Okay, fine. You can do the root canal. Just tell me what I'm supposed to do."
I'd never had a root canal. I'd always heard bad things about them. You know, people wouldn't facetiously say things like "I'd rather have a root canal" if root canals were especially pleasant, because that wouldn't make any sense. I mean, imagine asking someone if they're looking forward to work on Monday, and they say, "I'd rather have ice cream." Um, okay, so does that mean you want to go to work or not? You never know. But if they'd rather have a root canal, you can be pretty damn certain they're not in the mood to work.
And I was pretty damn certain I wasn't in the mood for a root canal.
Nevertheless, at Friday at 4pm, I was scheduled for my root canal. They called me on Wednesday to remind me. They called me again on Thursday to remind me. They called me Friday morning to confirm again. Maybe it was my tone of voice, but for whatever reason they really thought I was going to get cold feet about this situation.
Friday at 4pm rolled around, and I dragged myself up onto the dentist's chair. "I'm a little worried about this," I told them. "I've never had one of these before"
"It'll be fine," they answered. "Root canals actually have sort of a bad reputation, and they're not so bad. Pretty quick and painless. Besides, that tooth is dead, so you're really not going to feel a thing." Hmmm.
But you know what? Forty minutes later, it was done. All over. And I didn't feel a thing. It was great. If you could say that about a root canal. But it did seem great. Well, until then it was great. After that was when things started going off course.
"We're going to put a temporary crown on the tooth now, and then you need to book an appointment to come back for the permanent crown," they told me.
"I thought I'd asked to do it all at once?" I asked.
"Yes, we're doing the temporary crown today in this visit, where most people want to rest and do it separately, but you still have to book a followup visit for the permanent crown."
Sigh. I started to clue in that this was becoming a much more complicated set of plans than I had anticipated. By the time I left the dentist's office, I had two more visits in store for me:
1. A stop by the dental lab in Coquitlam to match the crown colour with my other teeth, important since it was a front tooth. "You don't need to make an appointment or anything," the dentist said. "Just call them when you're on your way. Go as early as you can so as not to delay the process. Saturday, if you can."
2. A return visit the following Saturday for the crown fitting.
These were in addition to the two visits I'd just had for the cleaning and the root canal itself. This was also before two more things happened.
1. I called the lab first thing Saturday morning to make sure they were open. Automated message: "Our office hours are 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday." Great. I guess I'm going to have to miss work Monday to do this. They totally didn't give me the right information on this one. Jerks.
2. Later that day on Saturday my phone rang. "Hi, it's ****** at ****** Dental Clinic. Um, we messed up your impression and need you to come back to redo it." Uh, what?!? "Yeah, we can't get the permanent crown made until we get this right." I told them I supposed I could drop what I was doing and swing by there in an hour or two, and they agreed I could come by around 5pm that afternoon. No big deal. Until they called me back again: "No, the dentist says it's actually going to take an hour or more to redo this, so we'll have to delay until next Saturday, which is the earliest we can work you in. Will that work for you?" I asked, since it was their mistake, if they might be more flexible. "No." But what about my existing appointment on Friday? "We can't make the crown until after the impression, so that's going to be delayed about a week."
"Man, how could this get any worse?" I thought to myself. Trust me, when it comes to dentists, don't ever tempt fate by asking that. Really. Don't.
Because two hours later, while I was munching on one of the goodies at a party we'd gone to, I noticed that my cheese was suddenly . . . crunchy. Why, you might ask? Because I was now chewing up my temporary crown. That's right — barely a day after they'd installed the thing, and it was disintegrating. And unless I could at least get the pieces back in, I was going to look like a toothless pirate until they could fix it.
The good news is that I was able to sort of smash the big part of it back in place so that no one could really tell anything was amiss.
The bad news is that the crown was basically being held in place by the power of prayer, and I couldn't eat anything for the rest of the party. I hadn't had any dinner. I was starving.
I called the dentist's office first thing in the morning, and they agreed to take me for an emergency repair at 2:30pm. I barely ate breakfast (just a small bowl of congee), all the while being super careful that nothing hard and pointy felt like it was going down my throat. I didn't even bother with lunch. Every time my stomach growled, I could feel the loose crown vibrating sympathetically against my gums.
After I sat down in the chair for the third time in so many days, the dentist (a different one, since mine was off for Sunday) was shocked when the loose crown rolled off into her hand. Then I was shocked when she dropped it onto the floor, and started crawling around trying to figure out where it had rolled off to. I didn't know if they had planned to repair the thing or make a new one, but now, after she pulled the fuzzy thing out from under the X-ray machine, I was pretty damn sure they'd better have a new one in the works.
They indeed made a replacement temporary crown. A better one than the first one, I could tell immediately.
And then I had an idea how to make this whole thing just a little more efficient. "By the way. As long as I'm here anyway, can you guys go ahead and redo the botched impression?"
"No."
"Um, please? I really don't have time to keep coming back here every time you guys screw something up."
"How was your root canal?"
"Excuse me?"
"How was the root canal, Friday? Fairly painless?"
Wait just a minute. Were they trying to emotionally blackmail me into admitting that because the root canal itself wasn't that bad, I had no right to complain about the circus which had transpired ever since then? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I think they were.
I at least shamed them into moving the redo-the-impression visit up to Tuesday (meaning I would miss plans with some friends, but hopefully end this whole ordeal a few days sooner vs. if I didn't come back until Saturday). Sigh.
Fast forward to 9am this morning. I walked into the lab to do the colour match. This is now dental-related visit #4, counting the original cleaning/checkup.
"I'm sorry sir, do you have an appointment?"
Blink. Blink. But wait, the dentist told me I didn't . . . oh. Damn. Yep, here we go again.
The people at the lab were pretty good natured, and took me in anyway since the mixup really wasn't my fault, but I couldn't believe how this was going. Now I really started to feel like both I and my insurance company deserved some of our money back. Seriously.
Anyway, here it is, Monday night, and I've got my fairly ugly but at least still intact replacement temporary crown, and presumably a correct colour match done sitting in a file somewhere. And tomorrow night, hopefully, fingers crossed, touch wood, no-jinx, I'll have an impression made that they can successfully make a permanent crown from.
And it's only taken five slices of my life to get that done.
And then at least one more appointment after that (not even made yet) to truly get it finished up. This permanent crown better . . . hell, I don't know . . . but it had better grant freaking wishes, or shoot lasers, or sparkle every time I say something clever, or, heck, at least carve vegetables into cool little Japanese shapes while I chew them — after as much trouble as all this has been, anyway.
* * *
To be fair, I can't say there's not a silver lining to all this. This morning, as I was getting ready for work, I noticed my pants seemed loose. I stepped on the scale.
"Hey. I lost six pounds this weekend!"
"Six pounds?!? I guess because you barely ate anything? Man, I'm jealous. I wish I could do that."
"Sure you can. Let me look up my dentist's phone number...."