The End(odontist)

I met with an endodontist yesterday morning. Early. Like, 7:00 AM. On a Tuesday. Call me crazy....

He ran the same gamut of tests as my regular dentist and her fill-in did: x-rays, tapping the teeth with the blunt-end of the dental mirror, biting on a hard pyramidal piece of plastic, holding an ice chip against them. And, like the others, he could find nothing at all wrong with my teeth. In fact, he called them "healthy". So he asked me to talk about the pain, where I felt it, was it throbbing or sharp, did I have any recent work done. I filled him in on the tooth extraction and the crown almost a week after that. I could almost see the light bulb exploding to life above his head.

With no signs of cavities or inflammation and with very recent stress on the jaws, teeth and gums, the pain in that tooth area was most likely a byproduct of the extraction and the crown. He said that the bundle of nerves for the teeth and jaw meld into one big knot near the ear, and the pain center has a difficult time pinpointing pain from such procedures, deciding instead to spread the wealth. And in fact, the pain had been lessening since Sunday which he assured me to be a good sign of healing.

So no root canal.

That's all I really needed to hear.