This is fun, up my post count which has been lagging for a long time. 
Here's the story on that tooth: 3 years ago my dentist in florida spent an hour trying to fill that one tooth but he couldn't get any type of filling material to hold at all so finally he said it would need to be crowned but he couldn't do it right then so he drilled it out to prepare it for the crown and put in a temporary filling and said to come back for the crown. Then I moved to Massachusetts. 

 Well it was a couple of months after that that I moved anyway. And when I moved, I got a temp job (which lasted 9 months actually) and didn't have dental insurance so I didn't get it fixed. Then when I got my new job with full coverage I just put it off for a long time. So I started going to a new dentist around the middle of last year, and she started off with just doing the normal fillings that I needed instead of starting with the crown (don't ask me why, I pointed it out to her, I guess she thought it would be okay for a while).
So...around September of last year I needed to have my wisdom teeth removed. So I went to the oral surgeon and had them removed, but that used up the last of my insurance for the year, so I didn't go back to the regular dentist (and by the way I still don't have feeling in part of my jaw after the wisdom tooth extraction and the surgeon couldn't explain it). So then this year rolled around, and I wanted to start going to a different dentist because the other one was so slow about filling the teeth (one per visit, meaning I had to take a day off for each tooth that got filled, which took about 15 minutes but due to the location I had to take the whole day off). The new dentist was closer, but apparently is popular so openings are few and far between. So I got a cleaning with that one but that was it. Then I missed the first appointment for a filling and the next one is in May.
So about a week and a half ago I started getting sharp pains in this one tooth which needed to be crowned. And it was making the other teeth near it hurt, and giving me headaches. But this had happened before and it went away, so I just took some Advil and that helped so I let it go thinking it could wait till the next appointment. I was wrong. It got worse, Advil stopped working. I called my old dentist on Thursday hoping she could do something for me on an emergency basis, but she said I needed to have a root canal done before the crown. Wish the bitch had told me that before.
So I decided that instead of going through the pain and expense of a root canal AND the crown (which would have killed my insurance for the year) I wanted it extracted. But by then it was after 5PM so I decided to call the next day. BUUUUTT...that was Good Friday and apparently God doesn't think dentists are needed on that day. So I had to wait till Monday. So I tried calling the new dentist to see if he could fit me in to extract the tooth. But oh, he can't actually do the extraction (and he wasn't there anyway), I need to see an oral surgeon.
So I called up the surgeon that did my wisdom teeth. Oh wait, this is Massachusetts, and Monday was "Patriot's Day" so the surgeon wasn't working either. So I had to wait till Tuesday to call, and they managed to fit me in with a different surgeon in that office to extract the tooth. So I went in, he extracted the tooth (and apparently the clamp kept slipping off because it took a while and made a lot of noises that from the way he talked sounded like he didn't expect that much noise) and finally got it out.
But it seems like I made the right decision, because he said a root canal probably would have failed due to the damage to the tooth and it would have had to be extracted anyway.
So long story short, 3 year old cavity which was drilled out deeply by a dentist in preparation for a crown, and it never got crowned and just started rotting away.
I warned you I get chatty.