My First Root Canal

There was nothing visibly wrong with it, there was no swelling or redness on the gum or cheek, and the tooth looked fine. But there was pain in the gum area, and on my tooth.

So I had a trip to the dentist for my tooth and gum pain. I had an abscess that was in my jaw bone, that was infecting my premolar, and spreading to the molar next to it. My tooth only had a tiny fracture, but the abscess looked very big. It has probably been there for a while, but there was no pain, not until a week ago.

I wondered if the ascess would have surfaced to the gum area, like what your body does to pimples? Bleh... maybe I should have waited with pain for a month or two before deciding to do a root canal to see if the abcsess would have surfaced, but I was afraid that the infection might spread, and it was the contant throbbing pain that was driving me crazy.

I tried oil pulling with coconut oil. I did the salt water rinse. I put raw garlic in my cheek to fight it, but I didn't know if it was doing any good, since it was still hurting.

So I decided to see the dentist, and she suggested the root canal. They used two needles to numb my mouth. It stung and hurt a little, but hot sauce hurts a lot more than that. I've never been scared of needles, so that wasn't hard for me. We waited a few minutes for it to numb.

Then the dentist and her assistant started working, and I didn't feel a thing. It was great not to feel any pain, but my mouth did feel swollen because of the numbing, but it wasn't visibly swollen at all. My premolar was filled with some white stuff. After it was done, they gave me antibiotics, one pill three times a day for seven days, then I will have another appointment with them the following week.

The day after, I'm still feel feeling throbbing pain, but I hope it goes away in a week.

I've heard that root canals in the long term might be bad, since the dead tooth is porous like a sponge, and any bacteria stuck in there will turn toxic and bypass the immune system, reeking havoc on the rest of your body.

So what I plan to do is when I'm off antibiotics, like the day after, is to use raw garlic to disinfect the tooth. The porous strucure of the tooth might allow the garlic juice into it and it might fight off the bad bacteria still housed in the tooth. I could leave the garlic pressed between my teeth for 15 minutes, then swallow it for more anti-bacterial benefits. I could do the garlic treatment twice a day over the course of three days, or once a day over the course of six days. Then use a salt water rinse five times a day for four days afterwards. It's quite a plan...

And if it doesn't work, so what. If it doesn't work and I get sick in the future, I'll just pull out my teeth and get dentures.