The Dentist

As Trav waits with sure trepidation for the dentist to call him back for his treatment, I cower out here in the truck. I am dentist phobic…I’m sure that there is a name for this phobia, but I never bothered to look it up. I just know that I cannot spend time in a dentist office without some major panic attack symptoms. This is in part, I am sure, due to the difficulties I had as a child with bad teeth. My mom was anemic when she was carrying me so they gave her iron supplements. These supplements caused my teeth to have to problems, one was a yellowish cast that never really looked quite right and the other was that the insides of my teeth sorta never developed correctly. By that I mean that if I got a minor cavity or a scratch on the surface enamel then the inside would just go away and the tooth would be just a shell. The next thing to happen would be that the tooth would either get infected because the nerve ended up exposed or the tooth would simply break. One dentist told me that I needed to come in as soon as something happened because if they filled it soon enough it would prevent the problem….nope, didn’t work, filling fell right out. So it turns out that when my parents took me to the dentist for routine cleanings, they were actually – inadvertently – contributing to the problem. They used metal instruments for cleaning and they would leave minute scratches or etches in the enamel…which in turn became breaches that evolved into cavities at the gum line. So guess where the tooth would break? You got it! So anyways, I am dental phobic. Which brings us back to Trav. Poor baby, he has a tooth that he has had trouble with for quite some time and instead of being a simple filling or extraction has become rather complicated. You see, he has a tooth under the gumline, one that never completely erupted so they are going to have to remove the problem tooth…this will leave a rather large breach in his jaw bone…which will make it difficult if not impossible to do implants should he choose to do that later, and will make his jaw unstable….a ‘glass jaw’ if you will. So when they extract those two teeth they are going to do a bone graft. Ugh!!! Makes me shudder just to think of it! He seems fine with it, a little nervous, but not really bad. He is so glad to be getting this tooth taken care of that the nerves thing is falling by the way side. The dentist told him that it would be a fairly simple procedure – despite what it sounds like – and that he will be able to go home and be pretty comfortable afterward. They did tell him not to go back to work tho, so it won’t be THAT simple. So I took the day off to take him to the dentist. He understood at the time that I am a terrible wife and I would NOT be sitting in the dentist office waiting with him or for him. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Ok, well, we are home now and he is sleeping. He says it wasn’t to bad, after she got the tooth out. She had to break it into several different pieces!!!!! Ugh. He said the hardest part was keeping his mouth open that far for that long. Poor baby.

Well, just wanted you to know he is ok.