Suzy Says

What makes a Monday Mondayer? Getting a crown installed!

Faithful readers may recall that I had a sudden and inexplicable hole appear in my tooth last month, revealing its ancient silver filling. Fortunately, it did not hurt. Unfortunately, it required a crown, bringing my personal collection up to three. Crown One: a filling fell out right before a) a national holiday; and 2) a trip to Detroit to testify in front of the Grand Jury. Spoiler alert: the crown was the fun part.

Crown Two: following the first (and I hope, last) root canal of my life, so expensive and upsetting that I cried afterwards. Again, the crown was the fun part, but to be fair, almost anything is fun compared to getting (and paying for) a root canal. I also learned that getting a crown is the inevitable result of getting a root canal.

Crown Three: this one. As I have learned the hard way over the years, I never really seem to get numb. I always feel part of whatever they are doing to me. I followed Dr. Megan’s prescription of taking an omeprazole every day for a week before the procedure, but I still felt the poking around and post installation like I did last time. I flinched and made a noise of discomfort, and the dentist genially said, “It must be waking up!” Dentists are masters of understatement. When I used to get my braces tightened, the dentist would tell me that it would “be a little tender” by dinner time. Translation: it will hurt like hell before school ends, and if you’re lucky, you might be able to eat Jell-O for a week.

But the post’n’poke was a total joy compared to a new sensation called a “heart race”. Have you ever had or heard of one of these lovely things? The dentist accidentally got a vein with one of the four shots of anesthetic, and told me that it was perfectly normal to feel the way I did. Which was like I was having a bad panic attack. My hands were shaking, I was freezing, and I was freaking out. I tried to calm myself by watching the bees in their hive through the operatory window and breathing deeply. Eventually it passed, but man, it was horrible.

So far, the third time has been the worst, rather than the charm.

On the bright side, the technology was great. Instead of making me gag by jamming countless containers of glop into my mouth, they took about a million pictures in there with some kind of space age looking thing. This was translated to a sort of 3-D mill that shaped the crown. On the screen, I could see the progress (just 12 minutes!) and it was very accurate. It just needed a little tweaking to fit perfectly. The dentist said that crowns made like this were much more accurate than the old, gloppy way.

He put the crown into a kiln to be baked and hardened, again showing the progress on the screen (15 minutes!) and then cemented it in. No temporary crown or extra visit. I was back at work in less than two hours. So maybe the third time did have some charm after all.

TEN YEARS AGO: Coming home from San Francisco.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: How to get nowhere.