Novocaine thoughts

[magid]

I know it interrupts pain, but somehow I assumed that it was just pain; it's very weird to rinse out one's mouth and feel the water in only half of it. Is there any way to interrupt only certain kinds of sensors? (Pain, but not touch, or hot/cold, for instance.)

My tongue went partly numb this time; I wonder if moving it around more helps the novocaine wear off faster?

The sound of the dentist tamping in the filling is much like the sound of trees creaking in a stiff wind. Much nicer than some of the other sounds.

The drills are so loud! And it's impractical to put my fingers in my ears when someone's working on my mouth. Just about as bad is the warm metallic smell, though.

It still entertains me that it's good to know calculus, but not good to have calculus.



Totally off-topic: the neat word of the day is tilth.

Also, Jesus Christ is alive and well and living in West Virginia (and, yes, he has a US passport).

Comments

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

In my experience, novocaine knocks out my pain and heat receptors (and cold, though to a lesser degree) but not pressure. I have to remind myself of this every time I get a filling or other dental work done because it's too easy to psych myself out in the wrong way when I start smelling tooth dust. Similar topical anesthetics, such as lidocaine, affect me the same way. I've had to use lidocaine on my skin and could feel pressure but not pain -- at least, not nearly as much pain.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I felt a little pressure when the filling was going in, but attributed that to sensors beyond the numbed area.

It was just odd not being able to feel the water swoosh through that side of my mouth at all.

Psyching in the wrong way: I did that for the extraction last week. Stressful...

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Yes, it can be stressful. I confess that I am afraid of visits to the dentist.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I don't fear dentist visits, even though all the cavities I had filled until grad school didn't involve any numbing at all. Well, other than dreading the (lack of interesting) reading material in the waiting room. Oh, and I disliked the feel of the hard plastic fluoride trays on my gums.

(I'm thinking I didn't mind the dentist so much because the doctor visits were much worse.)

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

My fear stems from a bad cavity-filling experience at age 10, I'm pretty sure. I was in an office that was run like an assembly line, with too few chairs and too many patients, and they didn't deal well with kids who needed to wait a couple minutes longer for the novocaine to kick in. It was a mess and ended up being one of the few times Mom didn't make me go back to school afterwards. I feel kind of silly still being scared, but there you go.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Not silly at all. Bad experiences can totally change things.

I don't know why my dentist didn't use novocaine, but somehow the pain didn't bother me when it wasn't actively happening, so I didn't worry about it in advance. Or I kept thinking I wouldn't have any cavities. (Or maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment.)

[prog.livejournal.com]

That guy's description made me think of a Robert Crumb character named Cheeses K. Reist. I would actually be more impressed to find someone named that.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'm trying to picture a situation where someone gets the nickname "Cheeses".

[cnoocy]

tilth! It's a -th word like warmth and death. (There's a bunch of them, but you'll probably have more fun finding them than reading them from me.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

In Ozarque's journal, there was a recent mention of "felth" as a possible parallel word for sense of touch. Also there was talk of coolth (in her journal? I think?).

Also, I don't think "death" fits in, quite: I'm thinking of it being a consonant+th ending group. Unless you're thinking of a different classification entirely...
(more in the consonant+th ending: width, length, tenth, lots more fractions, etc.)

[cnoocy]

I'm thinking etymologically. "death" is from "die" or "dead" + "-th" which is an obsolete noun suffix in English.

[magid.livejournal.com]

D'oh. Really, I should've seen that.

So, width and length fit that pattern (ignore the fractions). Hm... others don't spring to mind just now, but I'm focused on reflections this morning.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Woke up thinking health, wealth, filth, stealth. Oh, and plinth, too.

odd.

[cnoocy]

You would think plinth was from "plane" +th or something (filth is from "foul") but it turns out (according to one dictionary) to be from the Greek word plinthos.

Re: odd.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Ah, assumptions leading me astray. It definitely seemed like a "plane"+th situation, enough so that I didn't even think of checking a dictionary (OK, not that I checked the dictionary for "filth", either, though I couldn't quite figure out what the root word was. I'm being rather lazy this week.)

Now I've got a lot of -th words floating through my head, but most of them are archaic verbs (especially "saith", for some reason), not current nouns. Odd sort of brain worm.

Oh, month! (assuming it's "moon"+th)