Do you know what dentists call a tooth that needs a root canal? Until yesterday I didn’t, but now I do. They call it a “hot tooth.”

My dentist made time to take a look at my “hot tooth” this morning when I called his office and told the receptionist I had a toothache that’s been bothering me for a couple days. “Which tooth?” he asked me. “Upper left side,” I answered, because I’m not a dentist and I don’t know the name of each individual tooth. Just once, I want to answer, “It’s Fred this time. He’s been a very bad tooth.”

After taking an x-ray, the used a very sophisticated test to determine whether I had a “hot tooth:” they tapped on it with one of their stainless steel tools to see if I would yell. I did. After confirming that (and no doubt charging me a couple hundred dollars for the examination), they referred me to a specialist for a root canal.

The specialist had very sophisticated scanning instruments which made a 3D image of my mouth. This was real Star Trek-level tech. They could turn the image right or left, rotate it up or down, and move through the image to look at every inner chamber of my tooth but, in the end, they determined how bad it was by tapping on it with a stainless steel instrument to see if I would yell. Which I did.

After that, it was a matter of laying back in a chair and letting them root around in my mouth for an hour with drills and pokers while I quietly choked on my own spit. It was not a pleasant experience, but I kept telling myself that it was better than the toothache I had when I woke up in the morning and, honestly, that was true.