This Won't Hurt A Bit. You'll Barely Feel It!

A week before I'd sat in Howard's chair as he'd tried to anesthetise my gum before digging out the broken tooth's root from where it had broken again inside my jaw bone. After half a dozen shots failed to do the trick, he admitted defeat, and said "This is a job for an oral surgeon, he'll know how to get those shots into the base of the nerves and really put them to sleep!" A quick phone call, Paul said "send him over", and I was sitting in his chair five blocks down the street handing him the X-rays.

Sure enough Paul knew exactly where to slowly and delicately snake what looked like ten centimeters of needle alongside the bone inside my lower jaw, oozing just enough Novacaine out of the needle as he went along so the injection itself was painless. A couple of shots like that and the tooth really was numb. Finally! He dug out the pieces of broken root and I was soon out of there with prescriptions for an antibiotic and a painkiller.

Howard had warned me that Paul might not like me taking pictures during the procedure so I'd left the camera in the truck. But here we are a few days later. I'd asked Paul if it was OK to click off a few frames as he checked the state of healing and removed the stitches. "Sure, go for it!" he replied. In this shot he's clipping one of the stitches before pulling out the suture.