Confession time, I would rather see a proctologist than go to the dentist. I read somewhere that gums feel pain more intensely than anywhere in our bodies, and I believe it. Let’s just say I wasn’t thrilled to be at a strange dentist’s office in this first week of August. I mean, what’s wrong with this guy? Why wasn’t he on vacation along with every other doctor on the planet?
As I was walking to my patient chair after arriving, I saw him talking so sweetly to a boy of around eight. It wasn’t that fake sweet, either. He was developing a real rapport with this kid. So I felt optimistic.
After he spent five minutes looking in my mouth, he told me he couldn’t even fathom how I’d been managing with that tooth still there. He said I should have had a root canal months ago; that tooth needed to come out today.
Pain was something I had ample amounts of; cash, not so much. I searched my brain for ways to save a buck here and found none. The simple truth was that I had to end this pain and no amount of meditative breathing was going to do the trick.
This prince of a guy told me that he could do it but it would be a whole lot less painful if I went to an endodontist. I had never heard of an endodontist. The good doctor explained that endodontists specialize in root canals. And here were the magic words for me: this doc would have the technology to make the procedure go a whole lot faster and have it be less painful than a regular dentist.
The stars aligned for me that day in Sonoma County. The lovely receptionist called an endodontist and they had an opening that afternoon. Forty minutes in the endodontist’s chair—with NO pain whatsoever—and I was out of there. The source to my pain had been rooted out. Yet the pain of paying for the procedure would be with me for the next year, and no amount of mindful breathing could change that. Sometimes meditation and deep breathing will not help you release the root of your problem. Sometimes, it takes a root canal.
