DADVENTURE: The Merck Manual Moment

The parenting imagination is a powerful thing.  Unassisted by any technology, I was able to vividly imagine every grievous injury and fatal illness experienced by all humanity from the Common Era to the present between the time the woman on the phone said "school nurse" and "chipped tooth."  I experienced those ten seconds as if somebody had held the Merck Manual up to my face and thumbed through the pages at high speed.  All bones broken, horrible insect bites, ebola.  Elephantism.  The works.  On my kid.

Note to the National League of School Nurses or whatever: don't bury the lead.  As a matter of fact, the first words out of the school nurse's mouth when on the phone to a parent should be a brief description of the injury or illness.  To wit: "Chipped tooth.  Hello, Mr. Nichols, this is the school nurse at Jones Elementary.  Your son has chipped his tooth while playing soccer.  A molar actually.  He's fine, but he should see a dentist."

This approach, though it sounds odd, would be welcomed by every parent in America, sparing us the Merck Manual Moment described above.

"Okay, and he chipped his molar playing soccer?!  How does that work?  Is he playing with a mouth full of marbles or what?"

(Actually: playing soccer with a kid short enough to fit under his chin.  They both went for a header.  Short kid evidently went first.)

This is a call that is universally dreaded.  The sick kid call from the daycare may be slightly worse, but only slightly.  It's all bad.

I talked myself down pretty fast.  How bad can it be?  He's huge and he's nine, but the kid still has all his baby teeth.  Worst case: they pull the thing?  Plus then the dentist has a spot open at 3:30.  I'm dipped in it.  No biggy here.

Kid looks fine when he gets home, so I load him and his sister in to the van, making promises about painless new dentistry, and baby teeth, and small chips all the while.  It may have occurred to him when then dentist had everything but her office chair shoved into the very back of his mouth that his father is a big fat liar.  It was a permanent molar.

The only thing worse than getting your teeth drilled is watching your child get his teeth drilled.

Actually getting drilled is worse.  But watching is pretty bad.

Observing my son also taught me that an overwhelming fear of the dental tools and procedures is actually carried on the Y chromosome.  I recognized the ass-dance so very well. I tried everything I could to distract him, but laughing is hard when you've got cotton packing the size of rolls of Brawny bumping your tonsils.  My palms were damp by the time he rose from the table, but I was proud to see that the boy had left a full-body sweat angel on the dentist's chair.  It seriously looked like a crime scene body outline.  That's my boy.

Next time I'm going to insist on Nitrous.  For him, too.

Clay Nichols, Family Correspondent:
Clay’s column, Dadventure, published twice monthly to Gather Essentials: Family, is a sure-fire guide to raising flawless, perfectly behaved, and always obedient children.  Yeah, right.
 
Clay is the co-author of Filmmaking for Teens: Pulling Off Your Shorts, an award-winning playwright, and the Chief Creative Officer at DadLabs.com, a fatherhood website.

You can find all of Clay’s Dadventure articles at http://gather.com/dadventure