A trip to the dentist, and random errands
11 Dec 2019Today’s main feature was a trip to the dentist. I called her office up a couple of weeks ago and told them that I suspected that my tooth had gotten infected. By today, I was certain that there was an infection. Yuck.
She took one look at it and said, “Well first thing we need to do is take an X-ray to see if it’s the tooth that’s actually infected or not.” She left me in the hands of her assistant, a nice young man named Sanjeev. He took an X-ray and moments later, she announced that my tooth wasn’t infected at all. It was my gums. Which actually came as quite a relief.
She announced that it would require little more than some “deep cleaning”, which seemed harmless enough, until she also said that said deep cleanining would require anaesthetic. Yikes.
She had a hygenist do that, which must have been fun for the hygenist on account of not just cleaning someone’s boring old teeth yet again. It turns out that “deep cleaning” when it comes to infected gums literally means just scraping the infection out. Yikes!
After that’d finished, the dentist showed me the bits of gauze covered in gore that the hygenist had scraped out, and said she was going to go in and finished the job the hygenist had started. Yikes!!
When she’d got done hacking away at my gums, she liberally doused the area with an antibiotic gel, and then gave me a program of antibiotic pills to take, some antibiotic mouthwash, and a collection of interdental brushes to scrape away at my gums every day until I go back for a follow-up in a couple of weeks.
So then I posted a Christmas card to my sister, picked up some supplies, and went back home again.