Ain't so bad!

Ain't so bad!!

Whenver I hear that phrase - aloud or in my head - I immediately conjur images of Clubber Lang (Mr. T) pounding the living shit out of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone). And I see Rocky dancing around the ring, with his face cut and battered and bleeding and he keeps going. He just keeps moving and taunting Clubber. "Ain't so bad!" Punch. "Ain't so bad!!" Punch. Punch. "Ain't so bad!!!" Punch. Punch punch. Punch punch punch.

Well, now I have a point of reference. I recently had a quadruple root canal. I know what you're thinking. That's four times as shitty as your general, run of the mill root canal. Well, you'd be close. I think the quadruple is actually an exponent, rather than a 1x multiplier. It's "Wow, that sucks" to the power of 4. I now know from experience.

The entire procedure took more than 6 hours and constituted 4 different visits to the dentist. The first visit was your standard check-up. Clearly something was very, very wrong with my mouth (since breathing - seriously, breathing - hurt) and it needed to be fixed. Anyone who knows me, knows this is a feat of incredulity. I hate dentists. I would rather have my pancreas removed, rotated and put back in. In my mind, dentist = pain. I have never had a good dental experience. And despite my new dentists best efforts, the trend has continued.

Visit 1 revealed that I had fractured a tooth. As if that wasn't bad enough, it seemed I also cracked the filling in the fractured tooth and subsequently had allowed all variety of matter to pack itself into the crack and - more painfully - under the cracked filling. Essentially, I broke my tooth, broke my filling and got a cavity under my cavity. Oh, and my nerve was exposed to the elements, which is why it felt like a hot poker was being jammed somewhere between my upper jaw and my right eye every time I took a breath. And - as the cherry on top - there was a nasty infection spread between the nerves of the troublesome tooth and one of my sinuses. Super.

Visit 2 was the longest three hours of my life. I'd never had a filling drilled out before. Certainly I've had a hole drilled in my tooth to make space for a filling. But I've never had said hunk of metal/porcelain forcibly removed from my mouth before by a lunatic with 9 razor sharp instruments at his disposal. I hope it never happens again. It was awful. The sounds, the smells, the shooting pain and the horrible clenching of my shoulders and neck will go with me to my grave.

I'm sure some of you are asking, "Why the hell didn't you get general anesthetic?" Well, because I'm doing a play right now. I need to be sharp and alert and able to use my mouth to speak and sing. A general anesthetic would put me out of commission for more than 18 hours and unless I wanted to wait until April (if it was February 1 and you had a white hot poker jammed in your upper jaw, would you wait until April?) I had to run with simple freezing.

Anyway, there was drilling and yelping and clenching and poking and scraping. Good, clean fun for the whole family. Around the one hour mark, when he told me he was ALMOST ready to do the first canal, I shut my eyes and tried to find a happy place. I was unsuccessful. It may have been the horrible drilling and yelping and clenching and poking and scraping that was distracting me, but I can't be sure.

I tried to trick myself. I said to myself, "Ain't so bad! Ain't so bad!!", in an attempt to tough it out. It worked for Rocky, didn't it? Well, the trick didn't work for long. It may have been the unbearable drilling and yelping and clenching and poking and scraping, but nothing was certain in such a haze of pain.

Just before the 3 hour mark, he announced he was about to go into the 4th canal. As he prodded it with what I can only assume was a razor tipped epee blade approximately 4 feet long, I positively howled with pain. To which he said, 'Wow, that's still really infected.' Huh. I had a feeling.

This is where things got interesting. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of a root canal (single through quadruple), your mouth is propped open with a rubber stop on one side. The other side gets a stainless steel medical clamp secured around the area the dentist is working on. To the clamp, they attach rubber that keeps saliva to a minimum and keeps your tongue from thrusting itself in front of a screaming drill as an act of self protection. It's called a dam, I believe. Well, needless to say, the right side of my mouth was frozen (There had to be at least 8 injections, the most desirable of which was into the roof of my mouth - yes, right through the hard palette that's there). However, it's terribly difficult to freeze the actual nerve, so I still felt most of the horror. But the surrounding muscle had been jabbed full of the freezing. So, although I was aware how cramped and sore my jaw was from having been forced open for three hours (although this might be an enjoyable recreational activity for some folks, it's not for me), I was unaware just how hard I was biting down on the medical clamp. That is, I was unaware until the clamp snapped in half and whistled across the room.

The dentist was stunned. Completely shocked.

"I've never seen that happen before," says he. "I graduated in '92 and I've never seen that happen." At which point he showed me the stainless steel clamp I had bit in half and compared it with a newer, less masticated model. I was briefly distracted from my pain and amazed at the power of the human jaw.

Anyway, the story has a happy end (although it was laced with several more hours of tragedy). I am now able to chew with the right side of my mouth, but this whole fiasco was spread over a month. And as someone who needs to talk to make a living, let me tell you, that sucks. But, after 2 more visits and 3 more hours of unbearable drilling and yelping and clenching and poking and scraping, I'm still alive and I have a greater phobia of dentists than before. I leave you with my three favourite quotes that you don't want to hear if your dentist is peforming a quadruple root canal.

1. "I've lost the canal."

2. "You can still feel that? Huh."

3. "Wow. I've never seen that before."