Root Canal Treatment at Dentist Derby

I’ll be completely honest with you, when my dentist Derby told me I needed root canal treatment I was absolutely terrified. I’m a nervous patient at the best of times and I don’t really cope very well with pain. Add to that the memory stuck in my head about root canal treatment of a colleague of mine coming back to work and describing what had just happened to her (root canal work) as being worse than childbirth and you can imagine that I got myself in a right state.

I was up front with the though and told them that I was scared and why. The dentist was very patient with me and explained why I needed root canal work, what the alternative of not having it was and what would happen during the treatment. They also explained that in the 8 years since my colleague had had her treatment, there had been major changes in the methods they use so it wasn’t likely to give me the same kind of pain it had given her.

I started to feel a little better and agreed to go ahead with the treatment.

Why Root Canal is Necessary

My first question was why the root canal was necessary in the first place. I brush my teeth twice a day and regularly. I use a mouthwash and follow all of the advice. I even drag myself, and I really do mean drag, to the dentist once every six months for a check-up so I couldn’t understand why I could be in this position.

The dentist explained that bacteria had caused an infection so severe that the only options were to either remove the tooth altogether or to do a , which is to remove all of the “pulp” of the tooth and replace it with a permanent filling. Dentist Derby also explained that although regular dental visits do pick up on the majority of problems before they occur, unfortunately this had simply happened too fast for it to be caught.

My Root Canal by Dentist Derby

The first thing they did was to numb my mouth. As I’m nervous about needles, they smeared an anaesthetic gel on my gum first and then actually injected the anaesthetic into the numbed area so I felt nothing but a little scratch.

Once they’d done that, they took an x-ray of my tooth and the root so they could see where they were working and then they placed a dam inside my mouth to keep the tooth dry as they were working on it.

Once they’d dried the tooth they drilled into it and then filed away the nerves and the canals leaving the tooth hollow so it could be padded and filled.

My dentist Derby gave me a choice between having a normal filling in the tooth or having a crown on top. They explained that over time a filling could go brittle and I might end up losing the tooth further down the line anyway so I went with a crown and that was it.

I couldn’t believe how easy and painless it was.