Hi, thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope someone finds this interesting enough to give their opinion and maybe help me out.
In late February of 2014, I went for a cleaning and to get my teeth checked. It was the first time in 5 years, although in that time I have been pretty diligent about brushing and flossing. I wasn’t surprised though that I had some cavities and that some of the teeth that I had work on previously that the fillings had to be redone. Everything went pretty smoothly (at first), and my first work was 3 fillings (3, 13 and 20).
The one that went wrong out of these was 13. After about a month, I started having pain in the tooth. I don’t remember exactly when, but she finally got around to it maybe 2 or 3 months later because she initially thought the sensitivity might go away. Everything looked fine on the x-ray, but she decided to redo the filling. After she drilled, I noticed an unusual reaction from her. As she was working on it, I asked her what was going on and she said that the material had not cured. I inquired a bit further and she said that it must have not been done long enough last time and that perhaps her choice of trying to cure a full filling all at once had been a factor. This time, she was going to cure it in 3 steps to make sure it cured.
After the filling, the pain seemed to get better but I was still sensitive. She said it would be normal for that to be the case for the next few weeks since the nerve was sensitive. After the work was done, I felt sensitive for 3 weeks (mostly when I flossed and occasionally with chewing+ cold food) but thought it was normal. I went on a month vacation and during that time the sensitivity got even worse. I still don’t feel much unless I’m flossing. But the irritation while I pull down on the floss is getting worse (and it’s definitely not the gums because the pain is coming when I pull down and in the tooth nerve area rather than the gum area).
After vacation, I went back to the dental office but my dentist had left and I was assigned a new one. She immediately referred me to an endodontist and he said I would need a root canal. Furthermore, he said it was a deep filling in the first place that was a candidate for a root canal and so really, she tried to make it a filling but that sometimes it just doesn’t work and so it’s entirely normal. I asked him about the uncured filling exacerbating but he brushed it off saying, it “may have” affected the nerve but he couldn’t know for sure. I then talked to the “office manager” and she was even more flippant. She said she’d never heard of a filling not curing on the inside since “if the outside is cured, the inside just cures with time”. I told her that it’s what the original dentist told me but that she’s been in the field 16 years and never heard of anything like that but that she’d “check with the orthodontist”. At that point, she asked if I wanted to start the root canal today and handed me the estimate. I politely declined saying that I wanted to get to the bottom of this and get a second opinion.
For me, this is more of a case of trying to find the truth rather than a case of avoiding financial responsibility. I’m not a professional dentist, so I don’t know what might have happened here. However, it seems to me like the original dentist knew something was wrong and was trying to fix it but now that she’s gone they’ve gone into a mode of “cavities turn into root canals all the time and we tried our best”. They don’t seem to want to acknowledge that this redo is not a usual thing and that the uncured agent sitting in my tooth for a few months could be causing this. All I really want to know is what I should do… keep waiting for the sensitivity to go down or get a root canal. And if I get a root canal, is it really fair that I pay for it considering the way it all went down.