What was this pain I felt during my RCT? Dentist doesn't know

[donnieberry]

Now, I am a total novice when it comes to explaining RCT as I am not a dentist, so sorry if I mess anything up.

I got a RCT on my 1st molar, bottom left of my mouth. I got 2 rounds of needles to numb me up. While the dentist was cleaning the canals, one of the canals (I think, it felt like just one, but could be more) was giving me very sharp nerve pain that would go away the second the dentist moved away from it.

She said something like I may have a nerve ending in there, but I can't quite recall.

She then at one point put some paper things in my canal it looked like, or wool sticks or something I don't know, and when she was taking them out, all of my other canals, I felt nothing, but on one canal, simply taking them out gave me a 9/10 nerve jolt pain. The dentist was confused and said "I don't know what caused that pain, I've never had a patient have pain at that point before".

It's now 24 hours post RCT and I have no pain thankfully, but that definitely put me on edge. Throughtout the whole RCT, I was getting little nerve twinges at that specific canal, but when she took the sticks out, thats what I felt it the most.

what could it have been?

 

[Gordon]

Best guess? A couple of strands of sensory nerve that hadn't quite been numbed up enough by the local. The paper things are literally bits of blotting paper to dry the canal out.

 

[Dr. Daniel]

Hi. Numbing lower molars for root canal treatment (or deep cavities) is a known challenge (though there are solution for it). I made a few years ago a video exactly about this problem:
How to prevent painful drilling