One Monster After Another
Apr. 20th, 2005 12:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerOne of my favorite children's picture books is One Monster After Another by Mercer Mayer. I've always thought that the story makes a good metaphor for life working in computer support. It also makes a good metaphor for a stressful, shitty day. Today was a One-Monster-After-Another sort of day, and I'll just insert an LJ cut here for everyone who would like to skip the copious amounts of whining that will follow.
Molly's teeth have been problematic since she was, oh, 15 months old. That was when I first saw decay. I took her to the dentist and then failed to get them fixed, because they wanted to either put her under, or have me hold her down and drill without novocaine or anything else, and both options freaked me out horribly. I finally found a dentist who suggested that we just wait until she was old enough to cooperate with dental work, and that's what we wound up doing. She was able to hold still for fillings starting when she was about two and a half, and the dentist did the first round of repairs at that point.
I should note that while the "hold her down, no novocaine" option horrified me, she has had all her fillings without anaesthetic. Baby teeth, and I didn't believe this until she was old enough to let them drill without crying, have fewer nerves than adult teeth. (If the first dentist I saw had explained to me that he was quite certain it wouldn't hurt her, I would probably have felt okay with that option. Instead, when I asked how he would know if it started to hurt her, since presumably she would already be crying, he said something like, "Well, sometimes they scream louder." Very reassuring.)
The dentist had to work really quickly when she was 2 1/2, and the fillings didn't last long. Oh, I'll mention here, after dentist #1, we saw dentist #2, who wanted to put her under and do crowns for her front teeth. The cavities were mostly between her four front teeth. The dentist explained that it's a hard place to do good fillings; they tend to break. Dentist #3, the guy we've continued to go to, said that this is true, but it's not like the fillings need to last a lifetime -- these are teeth she should be losing in a couple of years. If she loses a filling, he replaces it.
At 3 1/2 she was much less cooperative than she'd been a year earlier; she had figured out that the less she cooperated, the sooner the whole unpleasant business was over. It occurred to me, after a couple of very frustrating visits, to try straight-up bribery. I told her I would give her $10 if she would hold perfectly still and let the dentist clean out all the decay and give her a nice solid filling. And then I'd take her to Target to spend her money. One week earlier, she had squirmed, refused to keep her mouth open, and grabbed the dentist's tools when they got near her mouth. With the incentive of a $10 bill, she opened her mouth and kept perfectly still without a single complaint for a half hour. So the $10 bribe is now part of the standard dental visit.
At this point, the original decay is all fixed. She had a checkup today, and in addition to two fillings that need repair, she has two new cavities. They are small and should be easy to fix, at least.
I also had the dentist examine Kiera.
After my experience with Molly's teeth, we have been downright fanatical with Kiera's. I do let her nurse at night, but we took her off the bottle (not that she ever got a lot of bottles) at 12 months, we give her only water and soy milk in her sippy cups and we use sippies rarely -- mostly she drinks from an open cup. Juice is limited, we don't give her candy (well, one piece at dessert time, which is right before we brush her teeth), we don't even usually give her raisins. On the suggestion of an article I read a while back, I put a speck of fluoride toothpaste on her brush. And I brush thoroughly, even the nights that she screams and fights and I have to hold her down to do it. I noticed a week or two ago that she seemed to have a little pit in one of her front teeth, so I called the dentist's office to add an appointment for Kiera along with Molly's checkup. I was really hoping that he'd take a look and say it was just some sort of little pit, maybe with a little staining.
But she has four cavities.
Two of them are in front -- the pit I saw, plus a matching pit in the one on the other side. These aren't in her two front teeth but in the ones next to them. The dentist said that they're the result of flaws in the enamel, and the two in back teeth are probably also caused by flaws in the enamel and not a lack of diligence on my part. Naturally, I spent the drive home trying to think whether I did something wrong during pregnancy. Did I take some drug I shouldn't have taken? Expose myself to some environmental toxin?
So, we have another appointment a week from now: Molly will have a filling done or repaired, and the dentist will try to fix one of the pits in Kiera's teeth. He says that these should be easier to do than the ones in Molly's, because they're not between the teeth. I wonder if I should just take her back to the HealthPartners dentist and have her put under to do a super thorough job right off. The thing is, general anaesthesia totally freaks me out. It is really rare for a child to die from being put under, but it does happen. Ed, who is similarly freaked out by general anaesthesia, noted that she's probably actually at greater risk from all the time we spend on the road getting to this dentist's office. Nonetheless, I guess I'll probably let him see if he can get her to let him fill the cavities. She was remarkably cooperative today.
My angst over this whole situation is compounded by the weirdly moralistic attitude towards tooth decay that I was raised with. According to the propaganda that was fed to me with my fluoride treatments all through grade school, if you are Virtuous (in other words, if you brush diligently), you will be Cavity-Free. If you get cavities, it means that you failed to brush or were in some other way Slovenly.
This is such bullshit, I realized, finally. Yes, if you never brush your teeth you will probably get cavities, but I know people who brush after every snack, who rinse with ACT mouthwash twice a day, who have had to get root canals because they have weak enamel or acidic saliva or some other weird physical trait that is totally out of their control. In Molly's case, apparently, she tends to breathe through her mouth. My own nearly-cavity-free dental history is mostly a combination of luck and the fact that my parents got sealant applied to my permanent teeth as they came in.
Anyway, so that was my morning. We went to Target and Molly bought a game with her money. (Chutes and Ladders, the Sesame Street edition.) Driving home, I considered stopping at the Children's Museum (we were right on 94) but decided against it because Kiera needed to nap. Then Kiera didn't nap, all afternoon, which made it difficult to play Chutes and Ladders with Molly, though we managed two games before Kiera decided she wanted to participate by grabbing the game pieces off the board. Tonight was swimming night, so we swam, came home to dinner from the crock pot, and Molly started complaining that her eye hurt.
Molly had complained about something in her eye twice earlier today. I'd helped her rinse it, then let her pat it dry with a towel, and both times she said it helped. Just before dinner, she started complaining again, and this time the rinse remedy didn't do the trick. I offered a warm compress, then a cool one, and she said they didn't help. So after dinner, when it still hurt, I called the nurse line offered by our HMO and described the problem. She said that Molly needed to be seen, because it could be a corneal abrasion, and those can get worse overnight because kids rub their eye in their sleep. Except she couldn't be seen at our clinic, because their Urgent Care was totally booked up, so Ed had to drive her down to this Urgent Care in the suburbs.
Where they found nothing whatsoever wrong with her eye. For some reason this seemed to really worry the doctor. I'm supposed to try to get her seen tomorrow by an eye doctor. Molly, meanwhile, says it feels mostly better.
The novel whining: I am closing in on the ending for the trilogy, and although I have a basic sense of what is needed to end it, I am feeling like I don't know how to get there, and every idea I have sucks. I'm sure this is greatly reassuring to all of you who were planning to run out next Tuesday to buy the second book when it comes out. I was thinking last night about item #5 on the Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness. I really like this piece of advice. The question is, in the world of my novel, what is the nearest analogue to sticking something in a safe-deposit box? This item is not actually the source of power (that, I know where it is, and how it was concealed). But it's very powerful, and was stolen once about ten years ago (by someone highly trusted), so what do you do with it to keep it safe? You need periodic access to it but not daily, so actually a safe-deposit box would be ideal...
Molly's teeth have been problematic since she was, oh, 15 months old. That was when I first saw decay. I took her to the dentist and then failed to get them fixed, because they wanted to either put her under, or have me hold her down and drill without novocaine or anything else, and both options freaked me out horribly. I finally found a dentist who suggested that we just wait until she was old enough to cooperate with dental work, and that's what we wound up doing. She was able to hold still for fillings starting when she was about two and a half, and the dentist did the first round of repairs at that point.
I should note that while the "hold her down, no novocaine" option horrified me, she has had all her fillings without anaesthetic. Baby teeth, and I didn't believe this until she was old enough to let them drill without crying, have fewer nerves than adult teeth. (If the first dentist I saw had explained to me that he was quite certain it wouldn't hurt her, I would probably have felt okay with that option. Instead, when I asked how he would know if it started to hurt her, since presumably she would already be crying, he said something like, "Well, sometimes they scream louder." Very reassuring.)
The dentist had to work really quickly when she was 2 1/2, and the fillings didn't last long. Oh, I'll mention here, after dentist #1, we saw dentist #2, who wanted to put her under and do crowns for her front teeth. The cavities were mostly between her four front teeth. The dentist explained that it's a hard place to do good fillings; they tend to break. Dentist #3, the guy we've continued to go to, said that this is true, but it's not like the fillings need to last a lifetime -- these are teeth she should be losing in a couple of years. If she loses a filling, he replaces it.
At 3 1/2 she was much less cooperative than she'd been a year earlier; she had figured out that the less she cooperated, the sooner the whole unpleasant business was over. It occurred to me, after a couple of very frustrating visits, to try straight-up bribery. I told her I would give her $10 if she would hold perfectly still and let the dentist clean out all the decay and give her a nice solid filling. And then I'd take her to Target to spend her money. One week earlier, she had squirmed, refused to keep her mouth open, and grabbed the dentist's tools when they got near her mouth. With the incentive of a $10 bill, she opened her mouth and kept perfectly still without a single complaint for a half hour. So the $10 bribe is now part of the standard dental visit.
At this point, the original decay is all fixed. She had a checkup today, and in addition to two fillings that need repair, she has two new cavities. They are small and should be easy to fix, at least.
I also had the dentist examine Kiera.
After my experience with Molly's teeth, we have been downright fanatical with Kiera's. I do let her nurse at night, but we took her off the bottle (not that she ever got a lot of bottles) at 12 months, we give her only water and soy milk in her sippy cups and we use sippies rarely -- mostly she drinks from an open cup. Juice is limited, we don't give her candy (well, one piece at dessert time, which is right before we brush her teeth), we don't even usually give her raisins. On the suggestion of an article I read a while back, I put a speck of fluoride toothpaste on her brush. And I brush thoroughly, even the nights that she screams and fights and I have to hold her down to do it. I noticed a week or two ago that she seemed to have a little pit in one of her front teeth, so I called the dentist's office to add an appointment for Kiera along with Molly's checkup. I was really hoping that he'd take a look and say it was just some sort of little pit, maybe with a little staining.
But she has four cavities.
Two of them are in front -- the pit I saw, plus a matching pit in the one on the other side. These aren't in her two front teeth but in the ones next to them. The dentist said that they're the result of flaws in the enamel, and the two in back teeth are probably also caused by flaws in the enamel and not a lack of diligence on my part. Naturally, I spent the drive home trying to think whether I did something wrong during pregnancy. Did I take some drug I shouldn't have taken? Expose myself to some environmental toxin?
So, we have another appointment a week from now: Molly will have a filling done or repaired, and the dentist will try to fix one of the pits in Kiera's teeth. He says that these should be easier to do than the ones in Molly's, because they're not between the teeth. I wonder if I should just take her back to the HealthPartners dentist and have her put under to do a super thorough job right off. The thing is, general anaesthesia totally freaks me out. It is really rare for a child to die from being put under, but it does happen. Ed, who is similarly freaked out by general anaesthesia, noted that she's probably actually at greater risk from all the time we spend on the road getting to this dentist's office. Nonetheless, I guess I'll probably let him see if he can get her to let him fill the cavities. She was remarkably cooperative today.
My angst over this whole situation is compounded by the weirdly moralistic attitude towards tooth decay that I was raised with. According to the propaganda that was fed to me with my fluoride treatments all through grade school, if you are Virtuous (in other words, if you brush diligently), you will be Cavity-Free. If you get cavities, it means that you failed to brush or were in some other way Slovenly.
This is such bullshit, I realized, finally. Yes, if you never brush your teeth you will probably get cavities, but I know people who brush after every snack, who rinse with ACT mouthwash twice a day, who have had to get root canals because they have weak enamel or acidic saliva or some other weird physical trait that is totally out of their control. In Molly's case, apparently, she tends to breathe through her mouth. My own nearly-cavity-free dental history is mostly a combination of luck and the fact that my parents got sealant applied to my permanent teeth as they came in.
Anyway, so that was my morning. We went to Target and Molly bought a game with her money. (Chutes and Ladders, the Sesame Street edition.) Driving home, I considered stopping at the Children's Museum (we were right on 94) but decided against it because Kiera needed to nap. Then Kiera didn't nap, all afternoon, which made it difficult to play Chutes and Ladders with Molly, though we managed two games before Kiera decided she wanted to participate by grabbing the game pieces off the board. Tonight was swimming night, so we swam, came home to dinner from the crock pot, and Molly started complaining that her eye hurt.
Molly had complained about something in her eye twice earlier today. I'd helped her rinse it, then let her pat it dry with a towel, and both times she said it helped. Just before dinner, she started complaining again, and this time the rinse remedy didn't do the trick. I offered a warm compress, then a cool one, and she said they didn't help. So after dinner, when it still hurt, I called the nurse line offered by our HMO and described the problem. She said that Molly needed to be seen, because it could be a corneal abrasion, and those can get worse overnight because kids rub their eye in their sleep. Except she couldn't be seen at our clinic, because their Urgent Care was totally booked up, so Ed had to drive her down to this Urgent Care in the suburbs.
Where they found nothing whatsoever wrong with her eye. For some reason this seemed to really worry the doctor. I'm supposed to try to get her seen tomorrow by an eye doctor. Molly, meanwhile, says it feels mostly better.
The novel whining: I am closing in on the ending for the trilogy, and although I have a basic sense of what is needed to end it, I am feeling like I don't know how to get there, and every idea I have sucks. I'm sure this is greatly reassuring to all of you who were planning to run out next Tuesday to buy the second book when it comes out. I was thinking last night about item #5 on the Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord: The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness. I really like this piece of advice. The question is, in the world of my novel, what is the nearest analogue to sticking something in a safe-deposit box? This item is not actually the source of power (that, I know where it is, and how it was concealed). But it's very powerful, and was stolen once about ten years ago (by someone highly trusted), so what do you do with it to keep it safe? You need periodic access to it but not daily, so actually a safe-deposit box would be ideal...
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 11:53 am (UTC)Of course, this doesn't get us off the hook. We're starting orthodontia with Delia now, and the bills are horrible.
Good luck with the eye thing. I hope it turns out to be nothing.
I've been whining about my novel, too. Mostly that I haven't been writing it. Feh.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 02:07 pm (UTC)Perhaps hiding it in a cave, but not all the other fancy stuff. In a nondescript cave in an area with lots of caves, and only the Evil Overload can find it. That, of course, depends on how close the caves are to where he is.
Or you could use the Purloined Letter method, and hide it among other similar objects, if there are such.
Sorry to hear about the teeth trouble. Poor kids. At least I didn't have any cavities until I was 12 or so.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 02:43 pm (UTC)I'm so sorry that it's been a rotten horrible day.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 02:53 pm (UTC)Or, could it perhaps be genetic? Somehow related to the enamel problems I had as a baby/toddler?
no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 03:39 pm (UTC)As for the object, it reminds me of a Dr. Who where the "Great Key" was a fake, and the real "Great Key" was kept in a desk drawer with a bunch of other keys. Hiding the tree in a forest, as it were. There's always dungeons, but its unwise to keep great objects in the room next to the captured heros. Of course if I wanted to be evil, I'd keep it in the dungeon room with the "trusted lieutenant" who stole it ten years ago, so I can watch him be tortured while I use the object. From Dr. Evil: "You just don't understand _evil_, Scott."
no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 03:09 am (UTC)