Hooray for dentists

I spent an hour and a half in the dentist's chair this morning, and I have to say that it didn't hurt a bit and, what's more, the technology was really interesting - it appears that one dose of gum anaesthetic and I'm turning into a nerd...

I had to have a molar reconstructed, and it was frightening to see how little real tooth was left! Note to me: stand over Ella while she cleans her teeth, so that she doesn't have to endure needles the size of cricket bats and lots of fillings. Anyway, instead of the usual crown/root canal, I was offered the opportunity to try a 'Cerec' porcelain reconstruction. Once the original filling had been drilled out a photograph was taken of the tooth and fed into a machine. I could see a contour map of my molar in glorious technicolour on a computer screen; my dentist then used various 'tools' to draw around its edges to show where she wanted the porcelain reconstruction to end, and the programme then calculated how to build the reconstructed tooth. Once it had finished thinking about it, it took 17 minutes and a lot of whirring for it to build (using some kind of laser technology, I guess) a perfectly-fitting replacement tooth. A few edges had to be filed down, and the 'bite' had to be adjusted, but after a bit of gluing and a bit of fiddling around I had a nice new tooth - perfectly matched to the colour of my existing teeth. Hopefully it should last at least 15 years - hooray!