Thank you all for your posts. I’m trying not to build it up too much but I just hate having to wait three weeks. I’ll be going to the only root canal guy in town 'cause he’ll have to drill through a permanant crown and my dentist wouldn’t touch it.
The other thing that sucked was that they gave me so much novocaine, my mouth was numb for hours, I couldn’t talk properly, and I could hardly taste any food.
It didn’t hurt, though-I don’t think I even needed any of the pain pills.
Had two. One twenty or so years ago and one 3 years ago. I was in terror 3 years ago because the old one was a horrrible experience. They have gotten much better. The new one was at McDentist. They has a counter with 3 girls lined up to check insurance and take information. Then lead you into a dentist chair with 3 minutes. The whole procedure was quick and compared to old one pretty painless. The have 4 dentists and all they do is root canals. The pain was $1000 .
I’ve had three and all of them were un-eventful.
After the first one I remember going back to work and mentioning that I’d had a root canal and my co-workers were aghast. They kept asking me why I wasn’t home in bed. I told them that it didn’t hurt and my only problem was that my face was numb for 4 hours.
In the end that first crown didn’t sit just right and I ended up (25 years later) with a gum pocket that required a little gum surgery. Once again everyone kept telling me how much it would hurt and once again it was no big deal. The dentist gave me enough pain killers to last a month. I think I took one the first day and it made me feel so woozy that I never took another.
Here’s wishing that your root canal is as uneventful and unexciting and mostly pain free as mine.
I’ve had a few, in the US and Thailand, and no bad stories to report.
In fact, I just had one today. Well, yesterday I guess, because it’s after 1:30am here now. It’s related to my threads asking if it’s possible my tooth is dissolving and detailing my $26 dental surgery.
This was under a permanent bridge, so the dentist had to drill a little access into it. Took about 45 minutes total. More work on it next Wednesday. Went into my office in the afternoon okay, and really no pain now at all. The beauty of it? It’s going to cost me about $100 total for the root canal. 
Ya gotta love Thai dentistry.
Ah, I just saw this. This will probably be similar to the drilling through a permanent bridge I just had, mentioned in the post above. I’ve had my regular dentist for years, but an arm injury prevents him from doing really complicated stuff, so his colleague did the honors. not a problem and really pain-free, even after the anesthetic wore off around evening.
Call me crazy, but I didn’t mind mine a bit. The root dentist had a television camera trained on my tooth and I could watch the whole thing in all its magnified splendor. The pain was minimal, as I recall there were 3 roots and only 1 had any pain. It didn’t take long to figure out which one it was and I was able to brace myself a bit because I could see when he was about to drill into it. I didn’t take all that long and the pain afterward was trivial. I think watching it all on TV made it easier and actually was quite interesting.
I’ve had one (so far… more are likely in my future). Bear in mind that I have a history of being very hard to numb adequately - most people won’t have the problems I do.
The tooth in question had been bugging me for years and the dentist said I could either try a crown, or go straight to a root canal. He recommended trying the crown. 18 months after the crown, the tooth still hurt like a motherfuck. So I made an appointment with the endodontist.
I’d been extremely nervous about the crown (I have a long history of severe, and well-deserved, dental phoboa), and it wasn’t that bad. Foolishly, I thought this meant I could tolerate the root canal without massive tranquilizers.
One shot of novocaine and I was nearly hysterical with pain from the novo. The endo said “I can give you Dalmane but you’ll have to have someone come to drive you home”. I was shaking so badly I could not even dial my cell phone at first to call Typo Knig. The process continued after a few minutes. The Dalmane did little. The tooth refused to get adequately numbed and a couple of times, I hollered and jumped in pain. This is not a good thing when there’s a drill bit inside your tooth - fortunately I did not cause it to break off inside. He had to spray novocaine directly into the tooth. Finally got done.
A week later the tooth hurt worse than ever. X-rays showed no evidence of infection or whatever so I went on a short course of prednisone. That helped. I actually had a few weeks of relief. Ultimately the pain came back worse than ever and based on the symptoms, it was decided the tooth was cracked and needed to be extracted.
So I wasted several thousand dollars on trying to save one tooth, where a 400 dollar extraction solved the problem.
Foolishly
Had one last week. It took two trip for the root canal, now I just have to wait for my insurance to approve the crown. The worst part is how unconfortable it was for me to hold my jaw open for such a long time. I think it was 1.5 hours each time. Even with the bite block it still felt sore. Also I needed additional novicane half way through.
It being allergy season there was a lot of shnot dripping down my throat and I had to keep swallowing which in turn flung saliva around my mouth and the doctor thinks it’s very likely some got inside which will down the line cause an infection. I’ll know when i start feeling tremendous pain.
As far as having pain after the canal was completed, I didn’t have any at all.
My root canal was the best thing that ever happened to my knees. You see, my regular dentist started it, but referred me to an endodontist because “it’s one of those squishy ones” and he didn’t want to take a chance of messing it up. Also, here are a couple of packets of Vioxx to help bring the “squishy” down before the appointment in two days.
So the canal went well, I’ve been back to the regular dentist for the impression, cause he’s doing the crown. It’s about three days since it began and I notice that I’m walking a lot easier. I phone my bone guy (I have osteoarthritis in the knees) to see if that might be the reason and he says, “Oh, yeah. I prescribe that all the time.” Ahem.
I’m obviously not on Vioxx any more, but we’re still being a wee bit more agressive with the knee meds. So the root canal’s still paying off.
I’m hard to freeze too, and if I need a root canal, I think I will go the sedation route. Fillings hurt; there’s always a twinge or two (or worse) regardless of how frozen I am (and I always need that extra, really painful injection right in the roof of my mouth). Just knock me out and have at my teeth. Fortunately, I AM easy to sedate - I can use regular aspirin as a sleep aid.
God man, it was terrible. Like having a root canal.
(OK, I’ve never actually had one. I just wanted to say that)
Only one thing worried me during mine
The Dentist had spent 10 minutes shoving tiny plastic rods down into the root holes. He nods to the assistant, and I hear a scrape, scrape, whoomp, whsssss. I can’t see, but I am thinking gas - burner - **blowtorch ** :eek:
Next thing I know, the dentist is waving a dental probe in my face with a glowing red-hot hook on the end.
There was a sizzle, and an acrid taste in my mouth - and pain, cause that was my lip, you pillock. The burned plastic taste was even worse.
And then it was over.
Si
No horror to report here.
I’ve had a couple and it was no worse than getting a cavity filled; with the exception that it took measurably longer to have the root canal prodecure.
A little site discomfort from the injections and also from having one’s mouth open so long… that’s about it.
Just the one, and it was a breeze. Felt like he was drilling about an inch deep, but no pain (mild discomfort when he snagged a moustache hair, nothing from the tooth itself). Mine was down to losing a filling and taking much too long to get an appointment to have it redone, and by the time I got to the dentist I was convinced it was time to kiss the tooth goodbye. It’s still there six or seven years on.
I too went to an endodontist and endorse the recommendation.
Sat in the chair, doc gave me the same type of novocaine as if this was a regular filling. Once the freezing took, the doc comes in with a big needle. The REAL freezing! He hits me with whatever that was and it felt like Andre the Giant slowly but firmly gripped my jaw. I have no doubt he could have unhinged half my face with a rusty chisel and I would have been oblivous.
Then he jammed a hockey puck between my teeth to keep my mouth open.
The doc looked through some kind of binocular arrangement the whole time. As a result instead of bending over my face as a dentist, he mostly stood upright, arms outstretched. The procedure itself took what seemed to be hours. I almost fell asleep.
The only effect after the freezing released was a bit of soreness from the hockey puck.
I hadn’t been to the dentist in… oh, about 15 years, and I went in because it hurt to chew on one side, although it never hurt otherwise. Apparently I needed two root canals, the same tooth on each side of my mouth. I’ve gotten one side done, and I’m waiting to pay off the first one until I go into debt for the second one. Here’s how it went down:
Appointment One: Spend forever trying to numb my mouth. The dentist comments that I have a really, REALLY small mouth, and I can’t even fit the hockey puck between my teeth. It’s a tooth with 4 roots, so it takes for freakin’ ever, and the novocaine runs out at the end. Instead of waiting for another shot to kick in, I tell him to keep going, and I’m out of there after like 3 hours. The drilling wasn’t bad, and cleaning the roots was no biggie, but I really didn’t like the shoving of the stuff back into the canals. Also, trying to hold still while they leave metal bits in your teeth and x-ray it to make sure they got to the bottom is amusing, in a keystone cops kind of way. They had the x-rays show up on a computer screen right in front of the chair, though, so it was really cool to see. The pain afterwards is mostly just soreness from keeping my mouth so wide open, and I was inexplicably exhausted from the experience. He says I need to wait about a month to let it heal, then they can start on the crown.
Appointment Two: He takes out the temporary filling, and spends the time shaping my tooth and taking molds. (The mold is awesome because they use what looks like a big caulk gun. I totally want one of those!) They really numb the hell outta me this time, and the whole appointment isn’t bad. They put in this bitchin’ silver-colored temporary crown that I call my pirate tooth. After I leave, I joke that I should go get my nose pierced because it’s completely numb. The temporary crown feels funny and my gums are sore, but I’m fine otherwise.
Appointment Three: This takes about 20 minutes. They pry off the temporary crown and put on the permanent crown. No numbing necessary, and I walk out of there with an ordinary-looking tooth. No problems since, and you could never even tell that anything was done. He did a nice job matching the color, and apparently it’s porcelin with metal underneath.
I’m not sure if you’re going to need a crown too, so you might have fewer appointments. The whole thing wasn’t as bad as I expected, and as a little side benefit, you can garner a lot of symathy from folks!
I had one done about a year ago, and it was fine. Quite intriguing, actually, as he’d showed me the X-ray pictures and I could follow where he was drilling and scraping. No pain at all, just a weird rasping sensation. And I’m in England, which is hardly renowned for its advanced dental techniques.
Actually, I lied about it being painless: the bill afterwards was excruciating.
I had to have two at roughly the same time (an incident I don’t care to recall, let alone describe, resulted in one of my lower back teeth on each side being broken/shattered). My dentist had this confidence-inspiring response to offer when he first looked at the damaged teeth: “Why aren’t you screaming?”
The actual procedures were surprisingly painless–certainly far better than the shocking pain I had been experiencing any time something (even air) touched those teeth. I’m really hard to numb, and it took four shots, but the shots and the achiness from having my jaw propped open were the only things that really hurt. I felt a twinge or two, more pressure than pain, while he was actually cleaning out the roots.