18-08-27 Monday - The Dentist and a Filling

Friday 17th brought a trip to the dentist. One of my fillings had fallen out while eating some jam, of all things. One of the fruit seeds had inveigled its way between my wisdom tooth and the filling in my second molar, which had only been in place for 18 months or so.  

It had been difficult enough to get in place the first time around; I'd been for a check-up and the dentist identified that I needed a filling, but when he tried to do it, the anaesthetic didn’t seem to be working that well. The dentist had to give me a temporary filling over Christmas and then I went back in January to have it finished off.  

I have a pathological fear of dentists. Well, it may not be a fear of dentists. I have absolute trust in my dentist. But I have a fear of people messing around in my mouth with whirry things like dentists’ drills and scrapy things. I don’t think that I've ever been hurt, but it is the anticipation of pain that drives me mad. My heart rate increases, I start sweating, I grab onto the arms of the dentist chair tightly and have to be talked down before I can let go (almost).  

On this occasion, the dentist agreed with me; the filling had fallen out. In addition, he said, the tooth was cracked and broken. It was in a pretty bad way. He attempted to refill the filling, which was a bit traumatic. Mr D used two different drills; one felt almost pneumatic, like a road-drill or something. The other was a finer, more high-pitched drill which really penetrated my skull. He had to remove the existing filling, bore out more of my tooth and then put in a bigger filling.  

He also warned me that if this filling didn’t take, he’d probably have to extract the tooth. The tooth was in such a bad way, he said, that even a root canal probably wasn’t worth it. That was depressing news, and bothered me for several days, to be honest. But actually, the filling hasn’t ached so it’s been okay. I’m not even sure that the filling is there any longer, but it’s not painful so I’m going to leave it. I’ll be back for a check-up anyway before I know it, and if necessary he can extract it then. At least if it is extracted, there won’t be any future requirements for fillings – in that tooth. One down, thirty-one to go.  

TTFN.