Had me a nice little root canal yesterday.

Now, normally you’d all be cringing and assuming that I’d be sitting here in mortal pain, with my head bound up in one of those rabbit-ear bandages holding an ice pack next to my jaw, popping Vicodin or Oxycontin like it was candy.
Friends, this was not your father’s root canal.
It took two hours, it was painless, my dentist has the coolest tools, and he uses these rubber or plastic things that look like tiny wire nails to pack the canal after he cleans it out with special files instead of whatever it was they used to use that made you cringe to even think the words “root canal”.
My sister has had several of these operations in the past and has always spent at least a week in pain and on drugs after one of them. This was the first one I’d ever had (I’m 48 and she’s 46, just for reference) and I was expecting to need drugs for at least a few days. Other than a little jaw ache after the novocaine wore off, which a few Advil took care of, I’ve been perfectly fine.
Right now the tooth (it’s a molar, bottom right) is closed up but doesn’t have a cap, because he doesn’t want the tooth above it to bang on it till it’s fully healed. In about 10 days I go back to get a cap that he’s going to make in his million-dollar new toy, a CAM tool that creates caps using some kind of digital photo-aided CAD process (no more plaster impressions, hooray).
He’s expensive, but damn, he’s worth it, and he does take my insurance. (And he hires the most amazing female technicians to work for him, which hurts absolutely nothing.)
I’ll be happy to recommend him via return email.