Pulpotomy
A pulpotomy is a big word that means baby root canal. Although it sounds scary, a baby root canal isn’t very different from a filling. It’s just called that because it means there was a lot more sugar bugs found on your teeth, and the cavity that they made was REALLY big. In fact, it was too big that we can’t just do a filling on it. But that doesn’t mean baby root canals are scarier than fillings.
It starts off the same way. What we still want to do is to get rid of those sugar bugs!
First, we put some gel on your mouth around the tooth with the sugar bugs. Then we pinch that area to put some sleepy juice near the tooth. The sleepy juice doesn’t make you sleepy, but it sure does make your tooth sleepy so that it doesn’t even feel anything while we are taking away those sugar bugs! If you’re still feeling scared, we can also give you some laughing gas, which will make you feel happy and take away all your nervous feelings.
Then we get started. This is what we do:
1. We use lots of water to wash away those sugar bugs, because everyone knows, sugar bugs dislike water A LOT! Mr. Thirsty, as always, will suck up all the water until it’s gone.
2. When all the sugar bugs are gone, we put a little medicine on the tooth to make sure it’s healthy. We spray a blue liquid and we also put in a ball of medicine.
3. Then we put a cap on it made of tooth colored material that hardens with a light.
4. At the very end, we polish your tooth, spraying lots of water to make sure there are no sugar bugs left!
And that’s all a baby root canal is! However, that does mean that your tooth had a lot of sugar bugs, and we don’t want that to happen again. You’re lucky that it’s just a baby tooth which will fall out when you’re older, but when your adult teeth come in, you definitely don’t want to have a root canal on them because you have your adult teeth for the rest of your life. So from now on, practice brushing and flossing every day after you eat! Hopefully we see you on our No Cavity Club tree on your next visit!