Painless Dentistry

I had my first real cavity filled today and it was a piece of cake, really. It actually took longer to deal with my benefits than it did to fill the cavity.

It only takes about 5 minutes to walk to the On-Site Dental Winnebago, but it's started to rain here (think Tahoe snow) so I hoofed it. Inside the RV, Dr. Oghabian settled me into the dental chair, explained that this was going to be easy, the cavity was tiny and she wasn't even going to shoot me up with Novacaine.

She drilled for about 10 seconds. The whinny, high pitched sound is annoying, but I can deal with it for ten seconds. It took far longer to dry the tooth to prep it for the composite. She stuck some kind of heater on my tooth to dry up the saliva, then patted down the composite. It took her a couple of shots to polish the filling so I couldn't feel it when I bit down, but I can't feel it at all. The whole thing took less than 10 minutes. It's almost like it didn't happen at all.

Back in the waiting room, which is a bench behind the passenger seat in the Winnebago, I chatted with Bryce while she tried unsuccessfully to get any information about me from my insurance company, MetLife. I didn't care because it started to rain buckets (think lots of snow in Tahoe) and I wasn't exactly in a hurry to get back to my desk. Bryce finally gave up and I ran back through the rain to Building Z.