My Traumatic Day

The title of this post should be "My Traumatic Week". (because it's all about me, right? Even though O had the worst of it) It has been one that will go down in our family history. Remember the time when we had no phone or Internet for a week? Remember the time that O had that horrible tooth ache? Remember the summer that was so rainy and cool that we couldn't go outside and play and drove Mom crazy? Remember that?

It started on Sunday when O's teachers in Primary gave her Swedish Fish. No big deal except one of the fish made her tooth hurt. Well, she's a bit of a drama queen so I gave her some Motrin and decided to wait. Finally on Thursday I was able to get her into the dentist. He was a new dentist that we were trying out, big mistake. He found a filling that had been pulled loose and instead of putting a new one in or even a temporary he said I should have 4 of her baby teeth capped and she needed to see an Orthodontist... WHAT? He gave me an estimate of $650 for the whole "work up". Well I started crying and left, and promptly called our other dentist to get a second opinion. they got me an appointment for Monday but that was 5 more days of pain for Miss O.

So I was the squeaky wheel and called several times to see if they had a cancellation. Finally Friday afternoon they said come in. I knew that it was bad but when the dentist said, "abscess, we'll have to extract" I almost cried, in fact O did cry. He also told me that there was no reason to put caps on baby teeth and that I just needed to come back with the x-rays and he would fix us up.

The "extraction" was horrible, I think I'll have post traumatic stress for the rest of my life about it. She screamed the whole time and kept telling him it was hurting her. The whole pulling process took about 7 seconds but it was the worst 7 seconds of my life. She had me convinced that she could feel the whole thing and cried for about 45 minutes. By the time we left Wal-Mart (we use that pharmacy) she was fine and said her tooth did not hurt at all, in fact it felt better than before. Last night I went into her room after work, still filled with the guilt of having waited 3 days to call the dentist, and she finally confessed that it didn't hurt when he pulled the tooth out she was just scared. A little of the guilt receded, not much but a little. Now she is back to her old spicy self. She is smiling again and talking and generally driving her siblings crazy.

Hopefully that will not EVER have to happen again. She's pinkie promised me that she will brush and floss everyday. I pinkie promised to make sure she does.