The way the last couple of weeks have been going, it's a safe bet that you can guess how Friday went. If you guessed 'more dental work', then you hit the nail squarely on the head. It has been two weeks (now a bit more than that) since my root canal, and I had gone back to Family Dentistry to get the molar in question cleaned out, built up, and have a temporary crown installed. Ordinarily, this isn't such a big deal because once the nerve's gone (i.e., post-root canal) you can pretty much dig around inside the tooth …

I worked the first half of today from home because I had an appointment to have a permanant crown installed in the top-left side of my mouth. At the same time, Dr. Hong was to start drilling out tooth #30, the first molar from the front on the bottom-right side of my mouth to take care of a fairly nasty cavity that's also been giving me trouble lately.

Four hits of novocaine later and I was still feeling the drill and trying to run away from it. No matter what he did, he wasn't able to knock out the nerve …

Translation: "You have an extra nerve that I didn't find last time!"

Yes, once again Gallifreyan physiology strikes, and I wound up rolling sour cherries in the dentist's chair.

Last week I had the first stage of a root canal done, and I've been in a holding pattern ever since while the last of the nerve tissue dried up and was flushed away, so that the core could be implanted and sealed.

Well, as it turns out, things are never quite that simple... Just like my last root canal in Pittsburgh, stage two involves the endodontist taking a set of …