A Series of Unfortunate Events

Hello and welcome to a sensational Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is February 8^th.

Welcome to Episode 4 of Sick: Season 1, the reality blog post that just keeps on giving. Who’s sick this week? Stay tuned!

On Monday, the Fourth Grader got a cast for his broken wrist (See Episode 3: A Broken Wrist); a nice neon yellow that was covered with signatures by the end of the day.

Tuesday had a serene normalcy that made it feel like a holiday. Oh, the joy I felt navigating through a regular day. It was the first day in weeks that I hadn’t taken temperatures, doled out medicine, spread Vicks on a chest, or gotten a phone call from the school nurse. Queue the Hawaiian muzack and bust out the banana daiquiris. This mama was home free.

And then Wednesday came.

Only this time it wasn’t a fever, or a sore throat, or a stuffy nose, or gastral distress, or a broken wrist. It was tooth pain.

“Mom, I’m in excruciating pain,” College Kid 3.0 said when he called me just before lunchtime. At the end of December, he’d completed a 6-month process of finally getting a permanent fake front tooth. After a month and a half of no problem, he’d experienced a sudden onset of incredible pain in his front teeth. He had been told to expect discomfort, but this – this was something to alert the emergency broadcast system.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said through tears and a tight voice. “It’s getting worse. I wasn’t able to sleep, and I’m exhausted, and I don’t know what to do.”

Obviously, get himself to a dentist, right?

I’d like to pause the story here to share an additional layer of complexity: my husband’s persistent penchant for saving money.

To put it positively, my husband is frugal with the best of intentions. He’s the guy who cuts the tubes of toothpaste open to use all of the toothpaste. He’s the guy who’d rather pass on the expense of anesthesia and take the Novocain for dental surgery. (He also has a fascination with dentistry and didn’t want to miss anything.) This is the guy who pauses in the middle of a medical emergency - like the time he had swelling and red streaks snaking down his arm from a rusty blade - to ask, “Can we wait until Urgent Care opens instead of going to the ER?”

My husband has nurtured and passed on this value of thriftiness to our children who, in a medical emergency, have been taught to pause and ask, What’s the cheapest option?

And did I mention College Kid 3.0 is in Philadelphia?

But he called Mom instead of Dad, which meant he was scared and needed comfort and rational advice before he could think about what the cheapest option was.

I gave him a crash course in Blue Cross Blue Shield, in-network and out-of-network providers, and how to use Google to locate dental offices. (You know the pain is bad when a teenager has forgotten how to use Google Maps.) After this tutelage, then I told him to call his dad who, to his credit, versed our son in all things Delta Dental.

An hour later, he had located a dentist (in-network) that was .2 miles from his dorm and had an appointment for the next day. “All you have to do now is take some pain meds and make it,” – I looked at my watch – “twenty-two hours.”

At 5:59 a.m. on Thursday morning, I saw I had a text from CK#3 sent at 12:28 a.m. “I woke up and half my face is swollen. My roommate is taking me to the emergency room.”

I have to be honest, here, and say that my first thought wasn’t OMG, is he okay? No, I’m sorry to say it was Cha-ching! Cha-ching!

“How did it go?” I texted.

“I’m still here.” He answered.

He had spent five hours in the waiting room with “Low Priority” tagged to his file. There’s only so much a parent can do when your child needs you and you can’t be there the way you want to be.

We texted and chatted on the phone while he waited for the doctor to “be in shortly.” I kept him company the best I could. He’d go on to spend another 3 hours there before getting the service he needed – a CT scan – ironically, only 2 hours before his dental appointment.

After the dentist appointment, our son called with the latest update. The dentist thought there might be some cement floating around in there causing the irritation and inflammation. “I can do a root canal right now,” the dentist said. If it had been me and I’d just endured two days of indescribable pain, a swollen face, and eight hours in an ER in a city that was still new to me, I would have laid back and said Ahhhh as if the dentist had invited me for a day at the spa. Instead, our son said he’d think about it and get back to him. He called mom for assurance, then dad who counseled the cheapest option, and finally his local Wannaska dentist and came up with a plan. He texted me the receipts for the antibiotics which came to less than $10. His dad was proud. CK#3 had done the best due diligence he could given his inexperience and misery.

While even I am grimacing a bit at the thought of the ER bill I know lurks on the horizon, I know that when it comes time to pay it, it will have been worth it. When he called me later that night, he said, “Thanks, Ma, for helping and being with me.”