Starting Monday night of this week Connor started complaining about his teeth hurting. Being five and a half, I assumed that it was just his baby teeth finally starting to come in and the pressure of the new teeth was maybe bugging him. So in my nicest mom voice...I told him to suck it up :) It didn't help that about a week ago I woke up with horrible tooth pain and the following day I had a wisdom tooth pulled out. I assured him, no one was going to pull his teeth out.
Oops.
Tuesday and Wednesday morning he complained again, on and off, again, we just talked about how it's normal to lose teeth, etc. Wednesday we get a call from the school nurse that he's been crying for about 15-20 minutes about his tooth. So, I made the call to the dentist who fortunately was able to get him in right away.
Right away turned into 40 minutes of waiting in the chair...moaning, crying, etc. We were 'that' kid in the dentist office probably ruining it for the rest of the children. Didn't help that shortly into our wait there was a kid in the 'back room' NOT having a good visit. This didn't help Connor's mood. Little did we know we'd be 'that' kid shortly.
Finally the dentist arrived and after just a brief check (yes, Connor still screaming, yelling, crying), she said there was an infection and the best/only thing to do would be to remove the teeth. Of course she didn't say that loud enough for Connor to hear, but I will admit I nearly started crying.
So, enter the torture chamber. I had called Bryan in for reinforcements by then. I finally got Connor settled down while we waited for the dentist to be ready, which was a welcome 5 minutes of silence. To sum up the following five minutes, the dentist had Connor in a headlock, Bryan was on top of his chest and I was on top of Connor's legs to restrain him for the extraction. He refused the sleepy gas (wasn't going to go under, but just get sleepy), so we just did local. In between screams and yells, Connor shared the following:
WHY CAN'T I CLOSE MY MOUTH!
WHY ARE YOU ON MY LEGS!
GET OFF MY LEGS!
MY ARM!
WHY CAN'T I FEEL MY TONGUE?!
GET OFF MY LEGS!
MY LEG HURTS!
I'M SO HOT!
While we were waiting for the novocain to set in, he ripped his shirt off, he was nearly dripping sweat from trying to get out of our restraints.
I will admit, at times, the four of us (dentist, hygienist, Bryan and I) were borderline laughing. We all know what it feels like to have numbness in your mouth and so his reactions were fairly normal, and obviously there wasn't a whole lot we could do.
The actual extraction took like 5 seconds, it took us a little bit to calm down afterwards, and then we were on our way home. See picture below, and yes, I was concerned that he was going to choke on the gauze when he fell asleep 2 minutes into the car ride home.
A few hours after we were home, he started to perk up, eventually agreed to look in the mirror, laughed at himself, thought his teeth were cool, etc. Of course every now and again he'd remember that he should be taking advantage of his condition, ie making me spoon feed him his mac 'n cheese, provide a few peanut butter cups, his friend Gwyneth brought him an ice cream treat, it was Schwans man night so he got something there, etc....we figured he did deserve it, it was quite the day!
