Dentistry Neighborliness

Dawn and Judd live next door with Jay and Kestrel. Kestrel is relatively new and Dawn is still adjusting to life with 2. She's also been sick a lot since the baby came so it's been hard. I've been chatting with her (as a former LLL leader and as a mom of three). Information and sympathy, not too much of the former all at once but trying to help her get healthy. Augmentin helped too.

Judd is a dentist, actually, an endodontist, which in my world means root canal guy. I am certain they do other things but that has been my contact with endodontists. I have had 3 root canals. One of them took for friggin ever and I was exhausted by the time it was over but didn't understand why everyone dreaded them so much. It was the best thing ever--I had been in a lot of pain. The second and third were done by a different endodontist and I swear the first one took 15 minutes once I was numb. Crazy. The last one I had was also quick, but it was a lower molar and the endodontist did some deep sighing as he looked at my x-ray.

Can I just say that's never a good sign? He broke the news to me. My roots were deep and curved and I had too many in that tooth. OF COURSE I DID. Too many vertebrae, too many roots in my molars. WHAT STUPID KIND OF SUPERPOWER IS THIS? He told me that he might not be able to get me all the way numb. Wha? I could feel my head start to spin. I'd had pain come through during a filling before. I couldn't wrap my mind around what this would wind up being like. Just pull the dang thing, I thought to myself. But I took a deep breath, nodded, and hoped for the best. In the end, it was fine. 13 shots of novacaine later and a hangover from that for days, I swear. But it was done and I trusted him to do anything at that point. Book my hotel rooms, take family portraits, remove my appendix, defend me in a murder case. Anything.

Anyway, the point is that I have a tooth going bad. I thought I'd lost a filling, one of those white fillings, in an upper tooth. Turns out it was the tooth structure itself crumbling away underneath a silver filling. Oh crap. I didn't know this until the afternoon I saw the dentist, though.

First, I came home with Leo around 11 and found Dawn and Judd's front door standing open. I called up to them, but I knew their cars were gone. No answer. I called the police and then Valerie and I walked to try to find either of them, to no avail. The police found nothing amiss and went on their way. Dawn came home and I told her what had happened. Baby brain, most likely. It was no big deal--nothing was wrong and Valerie and I had stood chatting in front in case the door was closed but unlocked.

So then that afternoon I went to the dentist and got the good news about my crumbling tooth and how close it was to the root and how she just wasn't sure about it. "Maybe it would be a good candidate for a crown," she ruminated.

"Does that ever work, a crown before a root canal?" I asked.

"Not in your mouth," she admitted. But she can't just have a bunch of root canals done all willy-nilly. I understood. I went home with my newly filled tooth we were going to "watch" which I knew meant "it'll be fine until it's 2 in the morning and IT ISN'T FINE ANYMORE."

I walked into my kitchen at home, shaky from the local anesthesia. I walked right through to the backyard where Jake was working on the treehouse.

"I can't figure out anything to make for dinner," I announced. And about that moment there was a knock at the door.

Judd was standing there with a big container of soup. "Thanks for saving us today," he told me, handing me the soup.

"Did you hear me just now talking in the backyard?" I asked him, and relayed my day's story to him. He had some advice. I took the soup. Jake heated it up and I managed to build something for dinner around it.

And then I went to bed. I woke up once in pain but ibuprofen kicked it. The next day I felt like I got hit in the jaw, but today I'm ok. I think it might be ok. We'll see.