Wow! This sounds kind of like what is happening to me, and I am looking for any and all advice.
Last summer I started to have a bunch of pains due to dental neglect. I had an abcess in my molar and I went to a dentist who saw me as an emergency. He did a root canal then and there, put a temp crown on, and sent me home with a prescription antibiotic. Mind you, he did the r/c when it was infected and inflamed and pus was coming out. I did not think anything wrong with this sequence at the time.
I had to leave town for a family death and when I came back one week later he put the permanent crown on. I still was feeling really bad pain in my jaw, though, so the dentist took an xray and said he now thought the problem was the molar next to the r/c he had just done. THAT new tooth was part of a bridge so he did a root canal right then and there and re-cemented the bridge. on. He also commented that my sinuses were really badly swollen (and boy, I knew that, they were tender to the touch).
Okay, two months down the road the pain comes back. This time the dentist says its a bicuspid that is the problem, and it's the one to which my bridge (the other molar r/c) is cemented. So he needs to do an r/c on the bicuspid, which he does, and once again secures it to my bridge.
Over the following 9 months I have continued to have on- and off- again pain in that jaw, and my swollen sinus (above the gums) never completely went away, but it did shrink some, and I learned to live with the discomfort. I called the dentist a couple of times and he said that it would take awhile for me to recover from the procedure, give it a year or so!!!!.
Okay, now it has been a year and today I am in really bad pain. The dentist is on vacation (office closed) so I go to see a new dentist in our dental network. This new dentist tells me (after looking at the x-rays) that the r/canaled molar is the problem and it's because the post perforated the wall of the tooth (?). I could see on the xray that the post was crooked, whereas the other posts were straight. He says that there is an infection there and that's why my sinus is inflamed and why it is causing pain to my other teeth. He said the other (rear molar with crown and bicuspid holding the bridge) look okay; not great, but okay for now. He doesn't think they are the problem. This new dentist is very apologetic and says that this faulty r/c stub is going to have to be extracted and he will have to make a new, larger bridge which will connect to my rear molar (now crowned). He put me on antibiotics to bring down the infection.
I am really scared. If this procedure doesn't work then I am going to have a whole side of teeth missing (!)
Is there any possibility that the problem is not my tooth but instead, my sinus? Like, I have fungal ball in my sinus? Or would a post that perforated do something like this?
Looking for any and all support.