Well... I got out of taking David to his first appointment with the dentist (Mike took him, then the dentist called me and talked to me about what he was going to need done!)  But, I was not going to get out of it so easily when he had to go back to have the tooth pulled. 

Friday morning, we headed in to see the dentist.  In the pre-op area, they gave David some medication, which he took like a trooper, and then we sat and watched.  The medication they gave him, is one I've seen used before, on my patients.  It's great, in that it makes the patient completely forget what happened to them.  Well, they gave it about 20 minutes to work, then took him back to take out the tooth.  He was getting a little unsteady, but still moving under his own power, at this point. 

We sat in the waiting room with our laptops, and worked on whatever projects we happened to be researching at the moment.  (For me, the current thing is beginning to map out Jr. High & High School for my oldest son, and my daughter, who though  2-1/2 years younger, is so competitive, she's right behind him in all of her schoolwork, so it's likely I was searching out information on homeschooling curriculum.... (a favorite pastime for most of us homeschooling moms!)  For Mike, the current passion is backpacking.... more on that later.) 

They had told us to expect it to take 4 hours, but they came to get us in about 45 minutes.  He had done great, and was in recovery.  The tooth came out without a problem, and we could come back and sit with him while he went through the recovery period.  The dentist's only concern, was that the antibiotic she had put him on, hadn't seemed to help much with the swelling, and they'd had to make an incision to drain the abscess (ick).  So, a change in the antibiotics, not a big deal.

We met up with David in recovery, and he was so funny.  He was still under the effects of the medication they had given him, and he was sitting on a sofa, or trying to.  He kept losing his balance and tipping over.  We waited in the recovery room with him for about another hour, as we waited for the medicine to start to wear off.  He had never before experienced the numbing of his lip and mouth that goes along with dental work, and didn't seem to like that very much.  He tried to show me that he was ready to go home, that he could walk.  He got up and was trying to walk around the recovery room, but he kept running into things, and walking sideways.  It was hysterical!  I laughed so hard.  He also kept asking me if there were two children in the other chair.  There was one woman, and the woman who had come to give her a ride home, but he was determined that he saw two children.  I was concerned that he might be hallucinating from the medication, but after the woman was escorted out to her car, he dropped it, so he must have thought that she was a child.  

As the medicine began to wear off, he started to cry.  This child is one tough little boy, and unless he's overtired, it takes a LOT to make him cry.  He cried, and cried.  I carried him out to the van, and he cried.  I sat with him in the backseat, and he cried, and I cried.  He cried all the way back to my parent's home (about a 30 minute drive). 

We got him settled on the sofa, and gave him his Tylenol with Codeine, and still he cried.  He would only stop crying if I was sitting with him.  So I sat on the couch with him, so he'd stop crying.  At one point he looked at me and asked "why am I seeing two of everything?"  I could only assume that all the tears and the double vision were from the medication he had been given to prevent him from remembering the procedure.  He finally fell asleep, and slept for nearly 6 hours.

When he woke up, he was a little sore, but not at all weepy, and had no memory of any of the day's events!  I was VERY impressed with that!  I was pretty agressive with the pain medicine for the first 24 hours or so, then at that point he said it didn't hurt anymore, so now he's just on the remainder of the course of antibiotics. 

Of course, the tooth they removed wasn't supposed to come out for another 5 years, so when we get settled in the next place, we'll have to find a dentist who will make a spacer for him to wear to maintain the gap, so his 12-year molar will have a place to come in!  At this point, I'm just thankful that we had a tax return that was big enough to cover all these unexpected expenses!  I just have to keep reminding myself that God wasn't surprised by this, and probably timed our tax return so that we'd have it to cover this! 

We've decided that we are going to go home to Michigan for a while.  We haven't been in over a year and a half, and we can wait for the next job there, as easily as we can here.  It's been nice to visit with my parents, but it's time for us to move on.  We'll be leaving here at the end of the week, so I'll update again, when I can, but it probably won't be until we are back home.