But can he start an IV? |
The last wisdom tooth in our family has been removed and sent off in the little red box of discarded body parts. Thank goodness. I hate when my kids are in surgery or at the ER or at the doctor or getting an eye test or being weighed or having any doctor do anything to them. This wing of the Fitzpatrick family is not nursey and I just don’t feel that we need to get all medical about anything. Ever.
My middle son’s wisdom teeth surgery yesterday was the last time I’ll have to take someone to have that done. Although, I’ve gotten to know the oral surgeon so well now, I kind of wish some of our other medical problems were in and around the mouth area. In these difficult times of screening doctors, this guy went to Harvard, speaks Cajun, is a pilot on the side, and is totally ripped. When my daughter was on her way to get her wisdom teeth out, she was running at the mouth at how afraid she was that something was going to go wrong. “Oh stop it,” I snapped at her. “He’s very cute, so I’m sure everything is going to go just fine.”
This surgeon also is not afraid to liberally use sedation. When my son came to, he was coming off the effects of Midazolam (the abuse of which was the substance of the week on a Law & Order episode once), and when I could understand his slurred speech, he was pretty hilarious. “You mean more than I usually am?” he asked me when I told him he was being funny. “I want to write a blog when I’m feeling like this,” he said. “But it would start out, ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaay,’” he said in his new Midazolam voice, which he accurately described as “a little bit better than Dick Clark.” (On Law & Order, the sedative was called by its urban dictionary street name, Dazzle, and things didn’t end as well or nearly as funny as our experience yesterday. That’s right, you guessed it: Somebody got murdered.)
My son was grateful for the doctor’s ability to get those wisdom teeth out of there without destroying any nerves or cracking into the sinus cavity, the two risks he was worried about. That and being molested while under sedation, something he apparently had been worried enough about to have discussed with his girlfriend’s father quite a bit last week.
“I wanted the doctor to like me around 75 percent. Just enough to respect me and do a good job, but not enough to be attracted to me,” he told me in his better-than-Dick-Clark voice. I assured him there was no molestation going on. “You’ve seen this doctor,” I told him. “He can get anyone he wants. He doesn’t need to be fondling his patients.”
So he decided he would use some of his new thank-you notes to send a note to the doctor, saying, “Thank you for not destroying my face and for presumably not groping me.” (Clearly, there was still some lingering doubt.)
But soon he was off that and onto talking about existentialism, planning what “trippy music” we were going to listen to on the ride home, and reading a Time magazine in the radio voice he’s practicing.
It was entertaining, and a nice little treat for me, before we got home and I had to start making Jell-O, keeping track of medicine, filling ice packs, and playing nurse, a role I really don’t like.
It was fun while it lasted. I guess we can’t stay in the recovery room forever.