My tooth didn’t explode, but your experience made me remember something I imagine to be similar in pain. At the very beginning of covid, they wouldn’t do any type of surgery/dental work with anesthesia that wasn’t an absolute emergency/necessary. So I had to get a tooth pulled with just numbing(it was a molar). It shattered when the dentist tried pulling it out, leaving the roots in my gums, and the nerve in the center of my tooth completely exposed. Having my tongue touch the nerve was so unbelievably excruciating, a whole new level of pain. And they wouldn’t remove it completely until 3 months later. So that nerve was just sitting in my mouth (back bottom right). Even saliva touching it caused excruciating pain all over the whole half of my face and neck. I lost 30 pounds because I couldnt eat, I couldnt drink water so I became extremely dehydrated, I couldn’t brush my teeth or use mouth wash. So it lead to more issues with other teeth because I couldn’t clean my mouth like I usually would. I don’t know how they didn’t think that was an emergency to remove it. Tooth pain is no joke. I get chills just remembering the pain. I imagine what you went through was a similar excruciating, torturous pain.

Edit:grammar and added a word.

AND… they actually made me pay for this absolute fuck up of dental work. I had to pay $350 to be in excruciating pain for three months.