Unable to afford my next door neighbor dentist who charges $2,000 for a cap, I signed up with Careington discount dental plan and found a dentist who is in their network. There aren't all that many in the area to choose from. I found a nice Indian lady who I can barely understand, who treats me like a baby and coos to me as she's taking care of my teeth. She calls her practice Gentle Dental. She's always extremely backed up, so if you don't have the very first appointment of the day, you will be sitting in her waiting room for an hour or more. Her fees are so much lower than the guys next door. About $600 for a cap.

The guys next door gave me a huge filling in one of the big teeth on the lower left. While they were doing it, they said it won't last that long, and I'll need further work on that tooth in the near future. What the fuck! Had they explained that to me before filling it, there's no way I'd have gone along with it. What the hell do I need with short term solutions of a year or two. And since the filling was so deep, you can believe it was damn expensive.

The new dentist didn't like what she saw. An abscess. Pus when pushed. She said I need root canal. She also said she didn't want to do root canal. It's out of her league. She said to go to a specialist. So I called two oral surgeons and left messages. Neither returned my call. I just said screw it, I'm leaving it alone. It doesn't hurt me, I'm not messing with it.

Months later I went back to my Indian dentist for a cleaning and she said hey, go to an endodontist and get that root canal done already, it still leaks pus when you push it. She seemed pretty adamant so I looked on the Careington plan for an endodontist instead of an oral surgeon, and found one, I said one, in my area. I left a message for him and wasn't called back.

This time I didn't wait long. I called again and again. Finally to my surprise a human being picked up the phone. I scheduled an appointment. She knew who I was because she heard my earlier messages. She just didn't call me back.

I walked into the office a few minutes early and the only person there was this tall black girl with a high pitched voice. She asked me if I was the 2:00 appointment. Yup. I told her I was in the Careington dental discount plan. She said the dentist accepts that, and takes off 25% of the bill. I said Careington posts its own fee schedule that dentists are supposed to adhere to. She said that doesn't apply to specialists. I asked her to call them to clarify it, she did, they not only backed her up, but they said that the discount for specialists is only 20%. Me and my big mouth, making her call them. She said that since she already quoted 25% she can't take it back. That was really nice of her. She seemed like a sweet and conscientious girl. She sucked at math and didn't have a calculator. She said the price is $1200, and I said with 25% off it would be $900. She didn't check it or anything, just thanked me for doing the math for her.

The dentist showed up. A short Jewish man of middle age. I was led into a dentist's chair to wait, and I was waiting a long time. Then the dentist came to me and asked what I was there for, and I told him that my general dentist had written him a note which I gave to the receptionist, so he went and got it. It told him to see if I needed root canal on teeth number 19 and/or 20 because of that crap in the gum in between the two teeth.

He took x rays. He stuck a "tracer" in my gum before doing so. He said the tracer would show which tooth had the infection. I never heard of such a thing. Sure enough, he told me that it was tooth 19 with the infection, and tooth 20 was fine.

He started poking my gum really hard. It hurt. I'm good with dental pain. I don't react much to it. But this kind of hurt. He said he was looking for pockets that would show it was a gum problem, not a root canal problem, and that he had to hurt me in order to do the test. Even though it hurt, it didn't mean I failed the test. In fact I passed, because there was resistance there, not a big empty pocket.

That's another test I had never heard of. This guy was testing for all sorts of things, using methods that no other dentist ever used with me. I figured yes, this guy is a specialist who knows what he's doing more than the guy next door.

He disappeared for a long time to study x rays of me. I thought he forgot I was there. He came back and said he wasn't sure that root canal would help me. Maybe I was throwing $900 in the garbage. He said the infection was too high on the tooth and too widespread, not the usual picture you see that can be fixed by root canal. He said if he did a root canal it might never heal, the pus might still come out. He called my dentist and told her it was a "guarded" prognosis.

I asked him what other options do I have. He said I could get the tooth pulled out and then get a bridge. I asked him what that costs. He said he can't say, but thousands. I asked him what he would recommend. He said if it was his tooth or someone in his family he would definitely get the root canal. I said okay, do the root canal. He asked if I wanted to make another appointment for it or do it now. I said do it now.

He told me he was going to check my tongue and mouth for cancer. I had to stick out my tongue while he grabbed it with a cotton ball thing or something. He poked around all over, looked here and there, felt under my jaw, then didn't say anything. Okay, I'll bite, what did you find? He said there are no red flags for cancer.

He put a little dab of something on a tooth and asked me if it felt cold. I said yes, a little. Then he did it again and again on other teeth. I really didn't know if it felt cold or not. I know I felt something, not particularly cold even though it was ice he was holding, but maybe a little cold. When I got wishy washy about it he didn't seem to like that much. I said yeah, okay, it felt a little cold.

He gave me shots in the mouth, near the bad tooth. Then he left the room for a long time. He came back and asked if my lip was numb on the left and right side. I touched them and said it wasn't numb on the right side. He said that's what he was looking for, and he left. I didn't see him for a long time after that. He was talking to a different patient outside. He was waiting for the anesthetic to take effect. It never did change much. It still felt numb only on the left side.

At times I thought of yelling out to him that I was still there. I thought maybe he forgot I was there. Maybe I was sitting there alone for 20 minutes.

He came back. I told him that I often had a problem feeling like I had to swallow a lot and that interfered with dental work. He said he'd suction my mouth out any time I raised my hand.

He put some sort of plastic thing on my mouth. Like if you rip a balloon and cut a piece of it out and apply it to somebody's mouth, around certain teeth. It was weird and I had never had anything like that before.

He did some drilling. Just a few seconds at a time. I never had a dentist who did drilling that way. Other dentists all did some pretty sustained drilling, making me feel like I had to swallow, because they had that water thing going in order to facilitate the drilling. With this guy there was no water thing going, and the drilling didn't last more than a few seconds each time. He'd drill for a few seconds, then grab some other instrument and spray or whatever, then do something else, then drill for a few seconds, and so on. Never saw anything like it. And he didn't have an assistant like all the others do.

So there he was, sitting next to me, grabbing an instrument and using it for 5 seconds, then putting it back and grabbing another one and using it for 5 seconds, over and over. He seemed like an artist to me. I had the impression that when other dentists do all their drilling at once and get it over with, this guy was a lot better than them. This guy was more of an artist, only doing the drilling he needed to do, constantly monitoring it.

He kept sticking those little metal wires, or whatever they are, into the canals, and rubbing them up and down for a few seconds. That was part of his routine too. I think that is what the actual root canal is. Shoving a piece of thin metal into a canal and moving it up and down. I don't know what that accomplishes. Maybe it cleans the crap out of it. Maybe it kills a nerve. The thin metal is kind of like a piece of a paper clip, only thinner. It is also kind of like a pipe cleaner. You can bend it. It's a little like an electrical wire.

I noticed he seemed to be shoving stuff into my tooth. I guessed that maybe he was done with the root canal business and was filling my tooth back up. Sure enough. He sat me up. He also took one more x ray. I asked him if I was done, and he said he'd have to look at the last x ray. He came back a few minutes later and said I was done. He said I might experience pain, and if I do, just take tylenol. When he said I might experience pain, I said "I doubt it". I never experience pain after root canal or any other dental work.

Then he said that he was a lot more optimistic than before. He thinks he took care of the problem. So do I. The guy really is an expert. It's the only thing he does for a living. Practice confined to root canal and nothing else.