..More on the Dentist
As I was saying last week; I sat down in my chair and pulled out my phone, to call Cheryl for all of the required information on the girls, and began to develop a terrible feeling that this adventure was not going to go well.
This feeling was further aggravated by the fact that the girls were incredibly squirmy and would not keep still. Just as I was ready to forget the whole thing and go home…they called our names.
The first room we went into was this dimly lit dungeon of parental doom; and as we walked in, the tech took one look at us and got a look of despair on her face that was deserving of facebook!
I sat there and tried to develop a strategy as to who should go first, and what the implications of that choice would be upon the rest of the experience.
The technician asked me who was first, and in a moment of parental stupidity, I made the call. “Gabby, c’mon honey, you’re first,” I said; my whole body trembled as the words escaped my mouth, and everything in that moment seemed to move in slow motion.
Have you seen the Indiana Jones Last Crusade movie where he is going after the “Holy Grail” and he is in the cave with the two bad guys and the “uber old” knight who has been guarding the grail for hundreds of years; and the one bad guy chooses a grail that’s all gold and bedazzled with jewels; and he dips it into the basin of water and takes a drink to see if he chose the right grail.
After he drinks the water, and melts into nothingness, the super old guy is all like…”He chose…(pause for theatrical effect) poorly.” Well that was me when choosing Gabby to go first. I CHOSE POORLY!
She handled the electronic exam pretty well, squirming and all considered, except for the confusion when the girl asked Gabby if she could see the letters in front of her, after each adjustment to the machine that Gabby was looking through. Instead of the appropriate response, Gabby kept saying “I see dots,” “you mean the letters are blurry?” the tech would ask, “no, I see dots!”
Gabby would answer, and this went on for a while. It was at this moment that the poor girl stuck her head out of the door and made sure that the office manager remembered she had three small girls in her room…and that we would be in there for a time.
Gabby was pretty good through all of this but freaked out when it was time for the dilation drops. This is one of those times when even the most honest of people will turn into blatant liars in an instant for the sake of helping a doctor inflict necessary pain upon our children.
We say things like…“no sweetie, this will not burn at all!” Well it did burn, Gabby was crying, and offended, Sophie began to cry with the realization that she was going to endure the same fate as her sister, and Mackenzie was climbing the walls and jumping the chairs in sweet bliss…I was mortified!
Let me just pause here and state that it takes about ten minutes for the dilation drops to begin taking effect. You will need to remember this for later.
Next, it was time for Sophie to go. After all of the set up stuff, I had a moment of brilliance whereas I realized that if I held Sophie’s head against the eye thing, and applied the right amount of pressure, she would be still, and the whole process would speed up. So I did!
The woman began her testing, and did her best to decipher whether or not Sophie was responding correctly. You know how this goes: “Can you see the letters now? Are they clear or blurry…how about now… ok, what is more clear…one, or two…A, or B,…how about now…one or two,…A or B.?”
Well, as she would manipulate the machine, Sophie would yell out, and with an offended tone… “Why did you make it fuzzy?!… it’s fuzzy, why did you do that?!” and as if that were not enough, Mackenzie kept going around to the tech’s desk and asking her “what are you doing now? What are you doing now?”
It was at this moment that Gabby begins to yell out…”My eyes are blurry! My eyes are blurry! Dad I’m going blind!” and she begins to get more and more upset, (remember the dilation drops?) So Sophie is in my lap, screaming at the poor girl to stop making the letters fuzzy; Gabby is behind me crying out that her eyes are going blind, and Mackenzie is just bouncing off the walls; all I could do was laugh, really, it was that or stress out, and the technician was doing enough of that for the both of us!
…continuation next week
Jason, father of six