The worst sound in the world

If you had asked me a week ago what the worst sound in the world was, I would have told you it was the sound of a jackhammer ripping up the foundation in your living room. Trust me if you have never had that experience, it is pretty awful. Every thundering crack reminds you of what an awful position you must be in to have your slab ripped open.

As of Wednesday I have a new worst sound ever. While this one also brings up horrible thoughts of why you are in a situation, the sound itself is repulsive. I hope to never hear it again in my entire life, and really hope none of you have to experience it either.

It is the sound of a dentists drill breaking your tooth apart. Yes you read that right, breaking the tooth apart, and on purpose too. I am not talking about the sound of getting your teeth drilled, which in and of itself is pretty horrid as far as sounds go. No I am talking about that high pitched whir, that grinding noise of metal on tooth that makes your skin crawl, and then a sickening cracking and shattering of tooth.

I had the unfortunate experience of having one of my wisdom teeth going bad. Well all of my wisdom teeth went bad, but the upper left one was a doozy. I had a couple get impacted and were easily pulled, and I had one come in half formed that was also a fairly easy pull, but not the upper left. This one was deceptive.

This tooth came in just fine. It was fully formed. It was not impacted. It had plenty of room to hang out with my other molars for the rest of time. So of course it would decide to be the most trouble in the long run since it looked to have the most chance of not getting yanked. Perhaps it just missed its brethren.

About seven years ago I started having severe tooth pain. A trip to the dentist revealed it was this particular tooth that had gone bad. There was an infection, and a sizable cavity in the tooth already. The diagnoses was it needed to be pulled.

Now if you have had a wisdom tooth pulled you know it isn't cheap. It is considered oral surgery and the trickier the tooth the more expensive it is. I am told my root is hooked and they will have to cut in to get it out and all manner of other things. The estimated bill is nearly $1000 with my insurance. That hurt almost more than the tooth.

Alas when my appointment came around I had the flu and had to reschedule. Due to the weird schedule of the oral surgeon and the fact that it was the holidays I ended up having to wait over a month before a new appointment could be made. In that time the transmission on our car exploded and we no longer had the money for the surgery.

I want you to take this scenario and repeat for seven years. We save the money, a pipe bursts. We save the money, I get a kidney stone that has to be operated on. We save the money, the husbeast gets laid off. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This last December I had to go in for a lot of really expensive dental work, and was financing the whole lot. I decided that if I was going to have $3000 worth of dental work, might as well make it $4000 and have that tooth pulled too. Of course by this point the tooth had all but crumbled away. The dentist said it was not an issue and added it to the list.

I know you are thinking now that December was certainly not this past week. What happened? Well after spending five hours in a dentists chair having a root canal, several partials and crowns, and a deep scaling, plus extracting another wisdom tooth that was an easy pull, they didn't have time to go after this one tooth. I would have to wait.

Then of course what always happens happened, we ran out of money. This was smack dab in the middle of the husbeasts last unemployment bout. I couldn't afford anymore payments to be heaped on. The tooth would have to once again, be put on hold.

This last week though it began to bother me, and we made the decision to have it yanked quick before something else happened. I went in expecting it to be a long drawn out painful and expensive process. The tooth, or what was left of it, was in very bad shape, and I still had a hooked root.

Half an hour, a lot of drilling, and a lot of yanking later, she had chipped away and removed all signs of the evil molar. I was wisdom tooth free and still pretty numb. I had my prescription for pain meds and antibiotics in hand and went to pay the bill, prepared for that to be the most painful part of the visit.

That is when I had to wonder if the shots she gave me were effecting my vision. My bill that I expected to be $1000 was only $230. The hell you say?! That was almost 1/5* of what I was expecting. Hellif I had known it would be that cheap I would have had the damn thing out years ago.

So in the end the only pain I am having is residual pain from having my tooth crushed from my head. I understand why this is the most painful after extraction experience I have had. If the sound that resonated through my skull as she broke my tooth apart with that drill was any indication of the pain I should experience, I am getting off easy.

Still, I hope to never hear that sound again.



*I tell you now that it took me a lot of time to decide if that was the correct fraction for what I was saying. Math not my strong suit.