The Endodontist

Involve:  To engage thoroughly, to occupy, employ, or absorb.  

I'm what you would call a teeth grinder.  I wear this highly engineered, custom-fitted, very expensive, indestructible piece of plastic in my mouth when I sleep, even when I nap.  I would have my chompers ground down to small, prehensile nubs without this thing lodged firmly between my teeth.  Sometimes in the morning I really have to pry at it to get it out of my mouth.  I don't think I grind my teeth when I'm awake, but can't speak to the other hours when I sleep the sleep of the dead.

So I got my teeth cleaned on Monday.  On Tuesday I noticed some soreness in my upper left rear molar - I chalked it up to the aftereffects of having someone probe around in my sensitive, damp mucous membranes with extraordinarily sharp stainless steel instruments.  On Wednesday it hurt enough that it was difficult to chew on that side, plus I had kind of a sinus pressure in the cheek right around that tooth, not unheard of in The Old City in the spring, where the yellow pollen falls from the sky in thick clouds, in waves of particulate.  Having lost my tolerance for pain I called the dentist, a guy I love and trust.  He referred me to something called an endodontist.  If you need to see a medical person who's title contains a Latin prefix that you can't decipher you know it isn't going to be good.  (Ed Note: endo: Prefixes indicating, within, inner, absorbing, or containing so I STILL don't know what an endodontist is). When your dentist says: "Fuck if I know what's going on" you're not in a good spot.  This guy agrees to see me and slots enough time so that if the nerve on that tooth is "involved" then he can just go ahead and do a root canal.

The only thing better than having your dad die is to have a root canal the next day.  I confess to being fascinated by the use of the word "involve."  It has a good, strong, vaguely sinister timbre to it, not aggressively threatening but promoting the sense that it could lead to some bad shit.

I have the ability to go from a resting state to disaster in a nanosecond.  I was fully prepared for the worst news.  I was capable of worsening the worst news, imagining a dying nerve cause by a cracked tooth.  I have no dental training but I'd guess this would require a root canal and the replacement of the destroyed tooth with an artificial one.  The receptionist said: "Before you come in let me go over the cost of the procedure."  It was quite a cost.  I could afford it but it was not a little number.  They wanted to make sure you were ready to pony up some scratch, like right then, before you left the office.

I'm one of those people who can handle just about anything as long as I know for sure what it is.  I figured "Root canal.  $1200."  I wasn't happy about either of those pieces of information but I was at peace as I eased down into the comfortable dentist . . . excuse me . . . endodontist chair.

The first thing the guy says is "Well, someone did a root canal on this tooth and they did a beautiful job."  Then he taps on my teeth with a little hammer, has me bite down on cue tips, blows liquid argon onto each tooth - I made up that last thing which he definitely did not do - to confirm that the tooth giving me trouble was indeed, that tooth.  I had a root canal already so I didn't need another one and the tooth had already been removed and a crown put in place so I didn't need a crown, either.

I told him about my dad.

"You're grinding your teeth," he said.  He took a burr off the tooth, prescribed Tylenol or Advil, and sent me on my way, sixty bucks lighter.

Stress will come out.  It will come out in your body or it will rot your mind.

(Ed. Note: spellcheck suggests "unexploded" for endodontist.  It doesn't know what the fuck an endodontist is either).