by Tanada » Wed 13 Apr 2022, 22:44:40
Had to get two fillings today, one upper one lower on the left side. Three large shots of numbing agent that took about six hours to wear off but I am extremely thankful to live at a time in a culture where excellent painkillers are available. When I was very young I had an "old school" dentist who firmly believed that the pain of drilling was an incentive for kids to do a better job brushing their teeth. The first time I received anesthetic for tooth drilling I was 14 and refused to allow him to work on me without numbing me up first like my school friends told me their dentists always did for them. As I matured I concluded that now long deceased dentist was a sadist who enjoyed inflicting pain on his patients, especially the ones to young and inexperienced to know their were painless ways to have your dental work done.
I shudder to think what it would be like living in a collapsed civilization where a broken tooth from poorly prepared food could lead to infection and death in short order. Archeologist/anthropologists examining ancient remains have found a number of well preserved bodies that died from abscessed teeth, the infections leave clear damage in the bone structure that doesn't heal if it kills you. They also have proof of people who survived abscesses where bone repair/regrowth took place and the person died of some later event. Those were the people with good immune systems who had someone knowledgeable enough to drain the abscess and as often as not extract the broken tooth remnant. I had to have two abscessed teeth extracted a decade ago and that required a full course of strong antibiotics to shrink the infection down before extraction. Unfortunately I had been suffering long enough that the bone damage made extraction the best option. Again, I am very glad I live in a time with powerful numbing agents and modern antibiotics.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Alfred Tennyson', 'W')e are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.