This is only a Test, Jennie

Jennie had a tooth that needed root canal therapy to save it. Her face blew up like a lop-sided squirrel, and she was begging for Junior Motrin the way I sometimes beg for sour cream and onion dip, but a lot louder and more insistent. She has always had whining down to an art form, and when her tooth and her face hurts, she's entitled to hone it up to a new high, and she did. Ignoring a constant "Put ice on your face" and "This is what happens when you don't let Dr. Joy work on your teeth because you were too afraid of the novocain needle", she actually preferred going to school over my company at home.

I didn't know that she was going to the nurse at school for ice packs because she was lying to me about how bad and how much her tooth hurt. So I got a "bad parent" phone call from the school nurse, during which I had to explain that we knew she needed a root canal - she had refused to let the dentist near her after an hour of trying, at which time the dentist gave up and handed me the xrays and the business cards from two pediatric dental clinics - and were trying to get her to a pediatric dentist that specialized in children with fear issues - and that it had taken five adults to hold her down for the anesthesia shot for the stitches in her toe a few weeks ago. That's one adult for every one and a quarter sutures, but who's counting?

The nurse told me she would never send a child to school with a face as swollen as that, and that the swelling could go to her brain and blah blah blah. I picked her up from school expecting a misshapen jaw drawing the attention of everyone. But the kid that I picked up looked normal. Perfectly normal. Her normal chipmunk cheeks normal, but normal. I had a few choice mental words with the nurse, but, hey, it's only September. Plenty of time between now and June to uselessly vent.

I get out the list of pediatric dentists covered by our medical and compare it to the names the original dentist had given to me when she surrendered to Jennie's ability to hold off the needle. There was one matching name, and, after stating the emergency and the nature of Jennie's problem, the dentist reassured me that she'd just finished working with an autistic child this morning. After that, Jennie would be no big deal. She's used to these sort of things with scared children.

OK, sounds good to me - I make the appointment and prepare for battle with Jennifer.

Flash forward to the dentist. She's a little tiny thing, with an office with fish everywhere, fish on a monitor in the waiting room, fish murals, and a fish fountain on the wall with running water, and anemone things on the arms of the chair for the kids to play with. Very much a theme. She's sweet and talks Jen through an examination of the tooth and the rest of her mouth, and a prescription for an antibiotic - and then tells me she can't do anything else, since she's not an endodontist. So we search our insurance for a pediatric endodontist, find no one listed, and start calling all the names we can get a referrals from the original dentist. Phone call number three is a guy with kids who works on kids. Says he's a father with three little ones, one of whom is also terrified of needles, so he understands what we are going through. He wants Jen to be the last appointment of the day, so that he can take his time to try to relax her and work on her.

I will greatly abbreviate what followed, except to say it took two trips, a prescription for Valium for Jennie, four hours on two different days in the waiting room, and two hours in the dental chair before the work was STARTED.

I needed medication of the liquid kind by the time it was all over - but I refrained. Besides, I was too tired to drink afterwards. And I needed to go to the store for more Junior Motrin.

Parenthood. Why, exactly, did we want to have kids in the first place? All the cats ever did was throw up on the furniture, a feat Jennie did within five minutes of her arrival home. None of them ever managed to kick me in the face while screaming and punching me - and that was AFTER the Valium.