OK, my weekend was interesting, at least. After making that appointment on Friday morning (the 19th) for Monday (the 22nd), I thought I merely had to wait out the weekend until the next adventure began. Wrong! Because while I was waiting the pain index went from pretty average (down) to up (pretty high) like the currently seesawing stock market figures: Down, up, down, and then up. Upping the Motrin again too, while going down emotionally, I realized that tooth 5 must have gone into overdrive.
Monday morning I emailed Dr. Lane one more time before I went to the oral surgeon, just to let her know what had happened over the weekend. She had already talked to Dr. Stewart when I arrived, but he was another skeptic, and rather disdainful of my question (and her information) about drilling out the periodontal ligament. After a short conversation about what I had done, and why, he questioned my decision to pull all my root caneled teeth, and then wondered what I was going to do with this next tooth if we found anything wrong. I told him I wanted to have it pulled, and I had 4 recent holes in my mouth to prove I was serious about that decision. His reply? “Well, I can’t say I agree with your belief system, but I’ll pull the tooth if you want me to.”
Unfortunately, that plan hit a snag when tooth 5 didn’t show an absess or some other kind of wrongness. Pain is one thing, but the new digital X-ray (another one!) was inconclusive again, and we need to have a certain answer. Although I actually got time to study this X-ray, even my untrained eye could see that there was no ‘obvious’ cause of trouble on that side of my face. The extraction site at tooth 3 was also healing cleanly, taking it out of contention too. So the question remains: What is causing the pain? Summing up the problem (and adding to my frustration, as well) the answer from the oral surgeon was to get me yet another appointment-to the office of the same endodontist I’d seen in September ’09 for my 4th root canal (because they still had all my info). His reason was that an endodontist could give me an answer that an X-ray can’t always provide: Is a tooth is dying or not?
Feeling like a hamster, I left the office wondering if I’d ever get off this wheel I was on. It was becoming a mobius circle, that I was going up and around and down and under, but there is no way off becaused the circle never ends. I called Dr. Lane (because she said to use the phone for the next two days while she was off work) and found she was in agreement with Dr. Stewart about his decision to send me to the other office. She also warned me that I might feel some pain, but I’d probably also get the proper answer.
So, yes, after all that, tonight I have a really big headache, that Motrin isn’t helping.