The Time the Dental Freezing Didn’t Work #DentalDread

While the past few years have been kinder to me in the dental department, it is only because I was scared straight by too many root canals and fillings. One of these visits in particular was especially dreadful and I wanted to share that with you today.

Imagine you are 26 years old and in the prime of your young life. Good job, beautiful wife and lead singer of your very own super cool band (coolness of said band may be exaggerated for story effect), when you realize you haven’t been to the dentist in a while and decide to book an appointment. The dentist informs you that you are well past the cavity stage and will need multiple root canals over the next few months. Awesome, right?!

The first couple root canals went great, so long as your definition of great is multiple needles being pressed into your gums while also keeping your mouth open wide for very long periods of time. Somewhere in the middle of “Operation Mouth Rebuild” something horrible happened that still gives me nightmares to this day.

The dentist administered the freezing needle into my gums, (yes, I keep writing that so you will think about how painful it is) and fired up his drill to get to work. The only problem is that the freezing hadn’t worked where it was supposed to so I felt every ounce of the drill plunging into the middle of my tooth. To say I jumped out of the chair would be an understatement, as they had to pry my screaming body from the ceiling!

After getting refrozen and calming myself down, everything worked out well but the freezing took even longer to wear off. Anyone who has ever had their mouth frozen knows how rough it can be to wait for hours for the freezing to wear off while you unknowingly chew on your frozen lip. Luckily for patients nowadays there are products from Septodont, which reverses unwanted lingering numbness after routine dental procedures where local anesthetic was used. After 6+ dental procedures, I wish there had been something like this for me.