I’ve had a severe pain in my lower jaw for the past two days, to the point where I called up my dentist and begged to be squeezed in sometime soon. Luckily for me, they could fit me in today at 11:30am. I trundled on down there and saw something new.

The office has upgraded its equipment. Now, when the hygienist takes an x-ray, the image is immediately displayed on a flat-screen monitor in the exam room. That means that the patient can see it, and the dentist can point things out to the patient. It used to be that the image would be pretty small and the dental folk would have to put it up on a lightbox to try to read it. Then they’d have to describe what they saw to the patient. I don’t know about your dentist, but trying to visualize what mine has told me in the past has been difficult. Actually seeing the pocket of empty space next to that wisdom tooth made it a lot easier to visualize it as a catchment for food particles no matter how well I brush or floss.

So he scraped it out and gave me a prescription for penicillin. I’ve never heard that penicillin has a pain-killing effect, but he seemed to think I’d be fine after a couple of days. If not, he said, he’d send me to a periodontist to have him or her close the gap between the gum line and the bottom of that pocket. It’s really a shame I didn’t think to ask if they could email the image to me; wouldn’t that have been useful to illustrate this post?

I really hope the penicillin does the trick without that.