Holy Emergency Dental Surgery, Batman!

I even have a poem for that:

Because some tortures are physical and some are mental,
But the one that is both is dental.
It is hard to be self-possessed
With your jaw digging into your chest.

etc. etc.

~ Ogden Nash.

And that is that for now. (O joy to have a hole in my tooth and in my bank account all at once. Curses, foiled again...)

PS: Interesting site where they explain what's up with a root canal. Here is what they did to me to help today:

"On the other hand, some people present with what we call a hot tooth. A hot tooth is one in which the nerve is alive, but badly inflamed. The tooth is generally already very painful, especially to hot or cold stimuli. These are the ones that require multiple shots to get anesthetize. A vast majority of these will numb out with a few carpules of anesthesia administered in the normal way. A few, however, are so inflamed and acidic that the anesthesia cannot diffuse into the nerve fibers well enough to totally destroy the sensations generated by the nerve in the tooth. In these cases, we may resort to intrapulpal anesthesia. In this procedure, we will drill very quickly directly though the top of the tooth into the nerve chamber (a few seconds is generally sufficient time) and deliver a quick squirt of anesthesia directly into the nerve inside the tooth. It's fast, and always effective."