By this point, SweetPea is vomiting so often she's given up on most of her meds, including her nightly cocktail of pain meds, sleeping meds and psych meds. Neither of us is getting much sleep and our house has turned into Grouchville. I'm clinging to these appointments like life rafts because I know that each one we get through is one step closer to done and one step farther from I'm going to kill her.
We had tried to do some appointment juggling for this one, because SweetPea had a conflict with another appointment scheduled a month prior. Unfortunately, she ended up having to reschedule that one as this was the current priority.
During the juggling attempt, she was told by the oral surgery office that if she got in by 11am, they could get her out within an hour (her appointment was 11:30). While this doesn't help us with the conflict, it's good to know we're in for a relatively short appointment.
Ha.
Ha ha.
Ha ha ha ha.
Right.
So we arrive promptly at 11am to find that, surprise! They're running an hour behind schedule.
This being the lesser of our concerns as the next thing we found out was that, no, they hadn't planned on needing to sedate her (remember the gag reflex) and she would have to have fasted for 8 to 12 hours prior in order for them to sedate her, anyway.
*picture SweetPea clutching the Jamba Juice she demanded on the drive over so she'd "have something in (her) stomach"*
Because they hadn't realized sedation was a concern, nobody had mentioned this fasting thing to her in all of their phone calls.
I pointedly explained the issue of her gag reflex and my concerns that they'd be able to extract the tooth at all without sedating SweetPea and I was assured that the anaesthetic they used was much stronger than the local used for the root canal, and that it would numb her throat, too, and, surely, this will be no problem.
Fine.
I repress the overwhelming urge to swat the receptionist on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and we wait.
When, finally, we get back to an office and start chatting with the oral surgeon's assistant, we discuss the gag reflex issue and share humorous stories because, ha ha, isn't this so funny and aren't we glad you can take care of this with your magic anaesthetic.
Only the assistant (a largish, bald man named "Junior") started to look kind of panicky.
Because, as it turns out, they only use a local anaesthetic just like the endodontist uses and his opinion is that we should reschedule so that SweetPea can be sedated.
*blink*
*twitch*
*blink*
What did we want to do?
And goddess bless SweetPea because she put her Big Girl Pants on and said "I'm not coming back, so you'd better get this tooth out."
I gave her a last minute pep talk before being ushered back out to the waiting room. A scant few minutes later she came stumbling out - successfully toothless!
The story I would get later is that she clutched the assistant's arm and that, when the tooth came out, it split in two and the halves went flying across the room in opposite directions.
As soon as we got in the car, she demanded frozen yogurt and it's been a soft foods free for all ever since. She was finally keeping everything down, including all her meds, and things around Grouchville finally started returning to normal.
Kind of.
Tomorrow: SweetPea gets crowned. And not King.
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