Edgy Mama

According to my girl, root canals rock. The procedure was no problemo. The girl bounced back into the endodontist’s examination room, leaving me in the waiting room. I was not prepared to be left in the waiting room, but the assistant told me I had to stay there, which kind of freaked me out, because it made it seem like REAL surgery. The only times I have not been in the room with my kids when they’ve had ANY kind of examination or procedure was when they had one of their several ENT surgeries (ear, nose, and throat, for those of you who aren’t parents or doctors).

So, while I chewed on Lifesavers and ripped recipes out of old copies of Food & Wine, the girl giggled with her endodontist. Half an hour later, the endo, an attractive young woman, comes to tell me that the procedure was successful and the girl was a star patient.

Then the girl appears and says: “I mastered root canals.” Though she pronounces “canals” like “ca-nalllls.” Which is damn cute.

We headed home and she ate a soft dinner of mac & cheese and then went to softball practice. No pain. No fear. She’s slept in the T-shirt the endo gave her every night since. She rocks.

That would be my elder child. The poor girl is scheduled to get braces put on her top teeth in three weeks, even though she’s young for them, because her newish adult teeth stick out so far that she needs extensive hardware to rein them in.

Unfortunately, she fell and knocked one of them on the school jungle gym at recess today, resulting in a three-hour emergency trama visit to the dentist (again-see the chip on the right one above? today’s accident involved the left front tooth) . There I learned that the nerve in that tooth is already compromised, so she’s heading for a root canal by about age ten. Oh, and we have to postpone the braces until the tooth’s ligaments heal (2-3 months) which is gravely disappointing to the girl.

This dentist was not our regular guy. Our regular guy, of course, is out of town whenever I have a dental emergency. The upside of this is that I now know most of the dentists in town.

My girl immediately bonded with the new dentist when she discovered he played basketball for the Tarheels (like 30 years ago, but…). The guy actually has a Tarheels room in his practice. It’s love for the girl.

So, given the extensive amount of time I’m likely to be spending with a pediatric dentist over the next ten years, do I dump the guy who is able to perform amazingly detailed dentistry on my boy while holding him in a headlock as he screams like Dustin Hoffman in “Marathon Man”? Or do I change to the former Tarheel who can wow the girl with his glory day tales and has freebie balloons in his office?