Addie and the dentist

 Addie, my 4 year old, has cavities. We brush, but apple juice and hard candies seem to have gotten the best of us. Since the cavities threaten the health of her adult teeth, yet to come in, her baby teeth cavities need to be capped; no simple procedure considering it requires a 4-year-old’s complete cooperation and the patience to lay still. Prior to agreeing to this procedure, we had been given 2 options: use an anesthesiologist to put her completely out or try to relax her enough with in-office medications to make her cooperative. The second option requires a sleeping pill taken in liquid form followed by sleeping gas. All this is to prepare her body for the shots of Novocain they’d inject into her gums. While I knew deep down the only real option for Addie, who is headstrong and vocal, was to be totally unaware of the procedure, to be knocked out, I preferred the choice that was the least extreme of the two. So, I ignored my gut and what I knew of Addie’s extreme personality and agreed to the sleeping gas. 

Half an hour after they gave her the sleeping liquid, she was slurring her words and leaning heavily against my side. Her happy, drunk demeanor lured me into a false sense of security. When they strapped the gas mask over her nose, she started to show signs of restlessness and angst. She inhaled gas for at least 20 minutes and it seemed, to me, that she was groggy, but not subdued.  She turned away from the mask and kept trying to take her pulse oximeter off. The dentist made some success scraping the temporary fillings off of her molars, but when he lifted the needle to inject her gums with Novocain, the whole world slipped into slow motion for me.  Addie quickly realized what he was doing, processed the pain she should be feeling and exponentially amplified it in her mind. She started with a low moan. She must have heard how poor an effort her declaration of outrage was because the next moan to escape her mouth came not from a slightly put out place, but from the depths of her outraged soul.  She pitched forward in the chair to continue her soulful screams and the dentist’s efforts to subdue her meet with not just restraint, but outright panic. As the drugs were taking slow effect, I had been reassuring Addie, telling her she was fine and holding her hands.  I am no stranger to Addie’s tantrums and screams. And if you have not had the happy occasion to witness, let alone hear it, be grateful your eardrums are still intact. Of all my children, Addie is my dojo. She is the child with whom I must always put my most instinctive responses in check and rise to a better place so that I can bring the chaos to a quicker close. She makes me feel both frustrated and protective at the same time. Addie’s will is indomitable and while I know it will be her greatest strength one day, right now it is regularly my greatest battle. It is also a source of my begrudging admiration. That isn’t a view everyone shares. I’m familiar with the looks and unwelcome comments about her disposition and temper needing to be controlled and smothered. But I know early what my battle would be: instead of controlling it, I’d need to harness it; instead of smothering it, I’d need to cultivate it.  I knew she would test all of patience, all of my will, all of the time. 

 So, when the dentist persisted in his efforts to inject her with novacaine despite her drugged protests, my protective instinct ignited. It was like a Mama cub watching her baby cub being cornered. I was prepared to gather her to me and barrel my way to the door. When she started to fight against the drugs, I started to panic, too. Not because her behavior was always so unwieldy, but because it was like watching a wild horse being broken. I started asking the nurses if all this was necessary, if we couldn’t just be done. I wanted them all to leave the room, so that I might re-assure Addie not just that it was going to all be fine, but that I would never let her be broken. At one point the dentist turned to me and said, “This is about lack of control. The response is either fight or flight. She’s fighting it.” As her screams grew louder and more frantic, I thought I heard him say, “How she responds to the drugs is an indication of how she’ll respond to alcohol. She’s likely to be a mean drunk.” To this day, I’m not sure I heard him correctly. Like any parent, I am defensive of people making negative comments about my kids and I am overly sensitive to their implications of my parenting ability. It’s as though he said not only are you raising a terrible child, but also that your child is pre-disposed to being terrible and it’s out of your control.  What I do know I heard was this “She’s fighting it.” I was not defensive about that. I was proud. Addie’s a fighter. That’s her personality and I should never have to make excuses for that. It didn’t help me feel any less helpless, though, or any less wrong about my decision to try the procedure without an anesthesiologist.

Every parent who has ever flown long distance with an energetic toddler knows the feeling of hopelessness I was feeling at that moment. Listening to the dentist’s response to Addie’s screams, I felt that same sensitivity and hopelessness in the face of this stranger’s judgments. They had to clear the back office of patients Addie’s screams were so loud. When I finally convinced them to stop and they had cleared the room, I gathered Addie to me. We sat there for a few minutes before a nurse dared to re-enter the room. If possible, she screamed louder at the sight of her approaching.  Walking through the dentist’s waiting room was like walking by a car crash only to realize you are the victim everyone is so perversely interested in viewing.

I was totally unable to calm her.  She screamed the whole way to the car. She screamed as I put her in her car seat. She screamed the full 10-minute drive home. When she wasn’t screaming, she was catching her breath to scream again. As we pulled up to our house, she spoke her first words since taking that fateful sleeping pill. “Mommy” she said between hiccupping sobs, “you’re not beautiful.”

I had run the gamut of all emotions: frustration, anger, helplessness and finally just resignation and tears. Addie loves dress up. She loves watching me get dressed in the mornings and she loves helping me pick out my outfits and jewelry. When I’m ready to leave for the day, she says, “Mommy, you look beautiful”. Telling me I wasn’t beautiful was her way of saying “I don’t love you. How could you let me get hurt?” It was my turn to catch my breath.

It took 2 more hours for the drugs to wear off. She couldn’t control the use of her legs or the enunciation of her words, so each time she tried to stand, she’d fall and each time she tried to speak, she’d slur her words. It was a shadow of her normal, vibrant personality and I was the one who felt broken for having made her go through it.

Being a parent is at once the most exalting of feelings and the most crushing. It is a constant wonder to me that I don’t do irrevocable damage to my kids everyday. I always feel unsure of my decisions, my handling of each situation. More often than not, I feel totally unequipped to be a parent. It is a job that has no end and forces you to adopt life-changing lessons every single day. You will learn more about yourself as a parent than you ever will in any other occupation of life. I don’t always like what it reveals, but I am always grateful for the lessons it teaches me. There is one thing for which I am the most grateful. Our children have short-term memories. This experience will scar me more than it will scar Addie.

We haven’t been back to the dentist in the last 2 months, but each time we pass the hospital where her dentist’s office is located, Addie points to it and says, “that’s where I go to the dentist. They give me a new toothbrush and a pink balloon. Mom, when do I get to go back?”