Root Canal Anyone?

I had a root canal yesterday. It was an upper rear tooth (#14), and the sucker had four humongous roots. Each one of them had to be reamed out thoroughly. I am a little sore today, and perhaps I will survive. We will see.

I had a previous root canal on the right side last spring, and outside of my panic at having the rubber dam installed blocking off my ability to breathe through my mouth, I was fine. The recovery was no problem. The rubber dam thing was some kind of fear of suffocation. You might not understand unless you are like me with tons of allergies and your nose blocked most of the time. Translation: I rarely breathe through my nose. So when someone blocks my mouth under a rubber dam, I tend to panic. Last time they had to give me 1/2 of some kind of pill and wait 30 minutes for the pill to take effect and calm me down.

So this time I elected for the nitrous oxide, which my wife had for one of her root canals. She said she was so relaxed, she almost slept through the procedure. That sounded good to me, so I tried it. I soon found out that this was the wrong approach for me.

Apparently I have weak nostrils. The doctor placed the breathing apparatus over my nose for the gas after he laid me back in his operating chair. The thing was a heavy plastic nose piece with tubes running into it. Since the doctor wanted me to tilt my head to the right, the gas apparatus slid down toward the right side of my nose (gravity at work). This forced my left nostril into a nearly closed position, leaving my right nostril the only vehicle for the nitrous oxide and that other thing we frail people need: oxygen (aka air). I tried to endure it thinking that the gas would make me woozy and I would not give a damn. The problem was that I wanted to keep on living.

So I fought that mask for an hour and a half; most of the time a hairs breadth away from the panic of not being able to breathe. I felt like I was underwater and trying to breathe through one nostril with one of those reed tubes you find on the side of ponds/lakes. I have seen it done in the movies where people breathe through the reed and their mouths. But I have never seen the reed trick using only one nostril.

After 90 minutes of near panic, I finally asked the doctor to take the gas nose piece off. It was a relief to be able to breathe again. By this time my left nostril was totally closed, but my right continued to work overtime to supply me with office air. Thirty minutes later the doc was done with my tooth. All in all, not one of my better root canals.

If any of you all have one, I hope yours goes better.