Sedation dentistry might be an easy answer for those dental chair fears. I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of the dentist, often times I quite enjoy a visit to the dental office. However, the other day after cracking my upper-rear molar, I went to the dentist to have it looked at.

For one reason or another, I started to feel anxious and a bit of a panic once the dental assistants started to reach back into my mouth. I figured I could tough it out, but my fear of swallowing some small piece of metal and gagging overcame me.

My dentist, Dr. Richard Bianco in Watsonville, recommended I try sedation dentistry. I was a little apprehensive at first, but after watching the video of the local news reporter having Dr. Bianco treat him, I was willing to try it. I did a few searches on the web when I got home for the drug that is used in sedating the patient - called Triazolam. The wikipedia entry is somewhat brief, but I didn’t find any major side effects.

The cost was around $250 for one visit. A bit pricey for two pills, especially if you have multiple visits in which you need to be sedated. However, avoiding the agony and anxiety of a root canal or molar crown, I think it was worth the extra expense.

My personal experience was rather pleasant, except for one glitch later that night. One hour before my appointment, I took the two Triazalom pills after fasting from caffeine for 24 hours, and food for 12 hours. Within 30 minutes I was getting pretty tired, and slightly dizzy.

Once I arrived at Dr. Bianco’s office, I remember checking in at 9:30am and sitting in the chair as they kept trying to get me to fall asleep. Another two doses of Valium did the trick. I do remember waking up in the middle of it, briefly - but I felt no pain, and was indifferent to what and where I was.

The next thing I knew it was waking up in my bed at about 6pm. I didn’t remember much, and felt no pain. Later on that night at about 12:30am I suddenly felt a rush of nausea and threw up for about 5 minutes. The feeling passed quickly, and that was the end of it.

The only drawbacks that I experienced were:

1. I was out of commission for the entire day
2. I felt nausea briefly later that night, and consequently threw up
3. The extra expense can add up quickly if you have multiple visits requiring sedation

In the end, I believe I will recommend dental sedation to friends and family (and all of you who read my blog) for major dental work. A quick cleaning I can handle, but a crown or root canal on a rear molar - might as well knock me out doc!

This may be a stretch, but imagine Doom XII over the web. Enter canvascape - 3D walker - a wolftenstein demo using the html element canvas.

Originally introduced by the folks over at Apple, the canvas element is an extension to the HTML standard that allows for dynamic rendering of scriptable bitmap images.

According to wikipedia’s canvas entry, it’s already fully supported in the latest browsers.

Checkout the other demos of the canvas element:

1. Canvas Breakout
2. Canvas Pong

Thanks to a few good people on the web, I came across the chicklet syndication creator. It’s a handy tool that will automatically generate those eye-candy syndication buttons for your site.

Helping people subscribe to your RSS feeds in their favorite aggregator.