Intentional RCT...

For those dental experts, this title would nothing be abnormal but when I heard my dentist talking about this, I was a bit taken aback.

My understanding of RCT - Root Canal Treatment is the treatment to force die the nerves of that specific tooth so that the tooth remains no more sensitive and this treatment is applied to that tooth which can not be cured by any other means - light cure filling, cement filling or even crown implant.

Couple of week back, I had underwent the sidewall filling for Upper Right 6. Since it was superficial filling, my dentist decided for the composite filling. As composite filling does not require much for tooth preparation, it just took less then 10 minutes to finish this filling. After the fliiling, I was hoping to be relived from this sensitivity problem but next morning, I had a terrible pain and increased sensitivity at certain points of that tooth.

The dentist decided to go for amalgam filling and as it requires a bit more time for tooth preparation, it took around 20 mins to finish this treatment. Since he wanted to see the results, he did not finish the surface of the filling and put me under observation for two days. The sensitivity increased almost 5 times of that before any filling and the pain by 10 times. He then scrapped the recent filling and put me on metronidazole ointment to reduce the pain to normal so that he can do any further surgery on it.

As I had enough with this, I sought the help of an expert. On Oct 01 of 2006, I had an expert advice from Dr. Mansi about my last tooth surgery about the impacted tooth removal in Sep 2006. I had blogged about it on MSN here... She came down this evening to our dentistry and had a look at my tooth... She did some tests and felt that I am a 1 out of 10000 cases with a very hyper sensitivity. She ruled out the case of lingual nerve damage as only UR6 had hyper sensitivity. All three dentists discussed possible options to solve this hypersensitivity and they all agreed for a "intentional root canal treatment".

Dr. Mansi said that it would be one sitting RCT and it can be over in an hour or so with no downtime for me afterward. I agreed to go for this surgery and then she started showing her skills on my tooth... First she injected local anesthesia at three places near UR6 and waited for it to be effective. Then she drilled UR6 in center and created a cavity wide enough that she could see all three canals... then using #20 and smaller files, she started manually drilling holes in those canals and that was the most time consuming period... Pulp started coming out and after about 30 mins, all canals were ready for next procedure. She then cleaned these canals and placed special cones in them. She then sealed these cones with some medicate "cement" and then placed permanent cement on the cavity to seal the tooth. She then filed the surface to give a smooth and natural finishing to the tooth. She was very caring and gentle through out this surgery and she used her tools very delicately on my tooth. Thank you very much Dr. Mansi. I wish you only extract my UR8 which is hanging useless since few years... but such surgery is underutilization of your skills.... Thanks again.

She did not prescribe me any medicine as some of painkillers for my sinusitis treatment will help me for this surgery too. My ENT specialist has prescribed me Cefuroxime Axetil 250mg 2D, Ampicilin+Dicloxacilin 500mg 2D, Rhinostat Plus 2D, Levocetrizine D 2D, Alprazolam .5mg 1D (I dont know why he prescribed me Alprazolam...) and Rabeprazole Sodium with Mosapride Citrate SR 1D... Cefuroxime is the antibiotic I have never tried and lets hope it would work for me. All remaining medicines have been in my blood in past at least once!

Alprazolam is showing its effect on me and my eyes are getting heavy now... So, let me call it EOB now!