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     For those of you who have read Book 1, you will recall that I had rabbited on for a while about a brief uninvited guest of dire unrelenting discomfort at the er, end, of the first Book that is. If you hadn’t, basically I had become stupendously bound in the outputs department because of medical stupidity and almost lost my eyeballs for popping out from the pressure.

     I had a somewhat similar brief uninvited guest of dire unrelenting discomfort during my third year at university. Although completely unrelated to the dire um, end of things in the first book, it did serve to put me into the dental history books in an ever so slightest of ways.

     The University of BC had just opened a new faculty of dentistry the year before in 1962. Since it was all new, the faculty could choose just about any topic they wanted to do for research. Among academics that was the, drool way to go. So among other things, the department had decided to look in on the still very experimental and still always popular procedure of root canals.

     A local family dentist was also on staff. He would do three days a week at the university and two days at his practice just up at Tenth and Sasamat Street not too far from where we lived. His research was root canals and his patients were his lab rats.

    He suggested I try a root canal on one of my back teeth, no guarantees. Having nothing to loose but the tooth which was otherwise already lost, I said “why not”. Probably the one expression in the entire English language most people would like to take back.

    The original root canal procedures were a very long and very arduous process. Nothing like the streamlined long and arduous procedures of today. Don’t forget it was through guinea pigs like me that the streamlined long and arduous procedures of today were eventually evolved.

    After a couple of weeks he was about two-thirds of the way through. After another two hour session of drilling with those little twirly fingery things, he put in a tiny paper cone of disinfectant, leaving just enough sticking up to grab onto in the next session. Then he sealed the whole thing off with a plaster cap.

     The reason it was taking so long was that at the time they still didn’t have a clue to what the parameters of safety were for infection. Don’t forget, these teeth nerves have a direct connection to the brain nerves for no reason that anyone has ever been able to figure out. So ‘better safe than sorry’ seemed to be a lot more prudent than ‘Hi guy, how was your pabulum this morning, Here, let me wipe away some of that drool’. So they were taking it a bit on the ultra conservative side.

     The next morning, I chomped too heavily on something which broke the plaster cap, driving the hard little paper spike right down into the open nerve sitting eagerly waiting at the bottom of the tooth root. I went straight up in the opposite direction through the roof of the house.

     Without wasting a second trying to decide whether I should try and tough it out or not, I went straight to the dentist. Fortunately he was still on office mode. I ran into his office with tears squirting out of the corners of both eyes screaming, “umph umph umph”. He took one look at me and asked if I’d jammed the spike into my nerve.

     I nodded frantically mumbling, “umph, umph, umph”. He put me in the chair and pulled the spike back up in no time, resealing the cap. It subsequently went immediately into the procedural record to always make sure the plaster cap after every session is adequate enough to handle any um, hard biting contingencies.

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