Prologue
Grimm Tale of the “First and Worst” at the Navy’s
“First and Finest”
A Grimm Fairy Tale is less difficult to believe than the ordeal I am about to relate.
It was May 2001 when this ordeal began as a relatively common dental procedure, a root canal, two of them in fact.
The need for the two teeth to be root canalled arose from cavities that weren’t evacuated properly and filled the prior month by another Navy dentist in Norfolk, VA.
So I was facing the need for two root canals, on adjacent teeth, because of symptoms diagnosed to be from dying nerves.
Simple to fix, so I thought.
The procedure was acutely traumatic, but subsided and I tolerated it well.
I graduated Officer Indoctrination School in Rhode Island in July 2001 and arrived in Portsmouth, VA to start my career as a Registered Nurse in the military.
Prior to leaving Rhode Island the Endodontist, who did my root canals, sternly instructed me to not allow time to pass prior to having the root canals completed.
I immediately checked my dental records in at the dental clinic at the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, VA and notified them of my existing dental maladies.
Less than a month passed and one of the two root canalled teeth cracked vertically before I could get an appointment to have it completed and had to be surgically removed.
The tooth next to it was known to be the other existing root canal and was allowed to remain unfinished for over a year and a half.
In the course of that year and a half I had to have another tooth root canalled, but whether that was actually necessary I’ll never know because all the x-rays taken by the dental department at NMCP have conveniently disappeared.
It’s now September 2002 and the prosthodontic department manages to keep me on their schedule to attempt to complete the root canalled teeth, including the one initiated in May of 2001 and the one done shortly thereafter.
Over the past year or so I have been to the dental clinic many times, sometimes more than once a week,
and made it known frequently that I had a root canal in need of being completed.
Neither it nor I was given much regard so I figured that maybe the Endodontist in Rhode Island over emphasized the need to have this procedure completed quickly.
It was never explained to me that teeth that are root canalled become brittle, but I soon found this out on my own.
After the frequent trips to the dental clinic, for over six months, for unrelenting aches and pains in my jaw I was finally told that “it was in my head” and to just get over it and quit complaining.
On October 1, 2002 it was proved that all the aches and pains were in my head, lodged securely in my jaw bone.
A hairline crack was found in the tooth root canalled in May of 2001 and the tooth was determined to need to be removed.
Great!
I figured this ordeal would end the aches and pains and my life would get back to normal.
Wrong again!
After the surgery to remove the cracked tooth I knew something was wrong, because the operative site wasn’t healing and the pain was more intense than ever.
I returned to the dental clinic on multiple occasions after my tooth extraction because of the pain and bleeding and was provided subsequently with multiple prescriptions for pain killers and Eugenal packing to treat what I was told to be a dry socket.
