My Experience

A bottom left molar had been hurting for a year. It was sensitive to hot and cold, and there was pain whenever I bit down on something hard. My dentist thought it might be a small crack, something that wouldn’t necessarily appear in X-rays but could cause the pain. One route was to have root canal. But my dentist suggested that he remove the fillings already in the tooth and put in a temporary crown. It was possible that the crown would solve my problem, and if my tooth felt OK for a few weeks afterwards, he would replace the temporary acrylic crown with a permanent crown.

Before the dentist came into the room, his assistant took an alginate mold of my teeth. The dentist then came into the room, we talked through the procedure, and he numbed my gum with anesthetic gel, and then injected lidocaine. I am normally squeamish about shots, but this did not hurt a bit. He massaged my gums a bit during the shot, which offered a distraction, and he gave the injection slowly, which allowed the lidocaine to disperse slowly and did not distend the tissue in the gums and jaw. He then left me for a few minutes to let my mouth get numb. Once I felt tingling and couldn’t feel pain, it was time for him to work.

He drilled old fillings away. There was no pain, and the whine of the drill was muted by my iPod (I was listening to a radio podcast). The dentist then picked around the tooth with some metal instruments, and began to fashion an acrylic temporary crown. It took going back and forth a few times – he would fit the crown onto the tooth, ask me to bit down, take it out and smooth it out – before he had a fit he was happy with. He then cemented it to my tooth and I rinsed with water and I was finished. It took a total of about 70 minutes.

Afterwards, I had some bleeding from the gums (from when they put the crown in below the gum line). Once the lidocaine wore off, I took some ibuprofen for minor discomfort. I was comfortably chewing food using the tooth with the crown about five hours after it was put on.