“Don’t Move,” He Said

It is September 6, 2019.  “Don’t Move,” he said. He was my dentist. I was sitting   in the patient chair with my mouth wide open. My dentist had just coated my tooth with adhesive, which would hold the crown in place.

To understand why I was getting a crown and to make a short story long, we have to go back to mid February.

The dentist was replacing a filling low on a molar that had gotten too old. That procedure went well. But a few weeks later, I was at an Aikido seminar and experiencing so much pain around that tooth that I could barely chew food.

As soon as I got back home, I started holding hydrogen peroxide on that side of my mouth to take care of what I guessed was an infection, which returned a couple of times after that. I put it on my list to discuss with my dentist when  I went in for my next appointment in October.

The infection had a different schedule, and in late August I was in severe pain and had what felt like a mini golf ball in my gum. I called for an emergency appointment. That ended up being a root canal, which would need a crown to seal off the cleaned and refilled root canals. 

During that visit I learned everything I didn’t know about root canals, such as why they happen. I had wrongly assumed that they were the result of not taking proper care of your teeth. Nope. The culprit is aging. As you get older the roots of your teeth begin to shrink, and when the canal becomes small enough blood and other stuff gets stuck, and that is what causes the pain.

One root canal and a prescription for antibiotics later, I emerged from the dentist’s office. It took about 24 hours for the pain of the procedure to go away and several days for the swelling to go down. And you know what? No one said anything about the lump in my jaw. 

The preferred antibiotic appears to be Amoxicillin, which comes with warning about possible diarrhea for for as long as 6 months. Yikes! Fortunately, I had in my cabinet Shaklee’s Optiflora prebiotic (powder that feeds the good “critters” that come in the probiotic pearl, as well as Optiflora DI (digestive and immunity), so no diarrhea for me. I know I can always count on Shaklee’s products to help me out.