Our eldest boy went in for his operation last week. Nothing big or serious, just seven teeth removed under anaesthetic. But if you were trying to gauge the seriousness by closely monitoring my freaking out levels, you would have thought he was going in for major heart surgery, plus a head transplant.
Teeth or no teeth it wasn’t all a walk in the park. We had some concerns and therefore my levels of stress were justified. The boy is asthmatic. The doctor, just out of earshot of Daniel, informed me that sticking breathing tubes into his airways could irritate them and set off a severe attack. I smiled maniacally at him and nodded, trying not to let the boy see that I was on the verge of an actual heart attack.
The doctor also informed me that because he had just had yet another chest infection, there was a small possibility that the breathing apparatus could project infection deep into his lungs and therefore give him deadly pneumonia. I nodded and smiled like a lunatic.
Then there was the small matter of his father taking a severe allergic reaction to anaesthetic and almost dying. But the doctor explained that we wouldn’t know if Daniel had inherited that particularly nasty problem until he was under. Again I smiled, nodded and forced myself not to fall onto the floor, hug that doctor’s legs and beg him not to operate.
So what if he has like 12 too many teeth? I’ll buy extra toothpaste, it’s no bother. Maybe another toothbrush, we could tape the two of them together. Could we not just take those teeth out ourselves? I know this old trick with a doorknob and a length of string.
But no, the doctor told me that it was crucial that this problem was sorted, by professionals who didn't use string and doors as their tools. And it needed to be sorted today.
So we sat there on the hospital bed waiting our turn. Me trying my very best not to look absolutely terrified, him pondering what the tooth fairy’s going rate is.
Then they came for us, the hospital porters, like green-gowned helpers to an executioner and whizzed us down to the guillotine, I mean operating theatre.
I have been in a fair few scrapes in my day. I’ve had my very existence threatened. But that was me, not my precious son. I can honestly say that I have never been more terrified than I was walking behind my boy’s bed on our way to that theatre.
Yes, it was only teeth, yes it was only simple but that was my boy and there was the asthma, the pneumonia, the deadly allergic reaction. I was handing his life over to strangers who were going to knock him out and cut him open.
As the anaesthetist, who bore more than a passing resemblance to Alexei Sayle, wrestled with my boy to get him to keep a gas mask on, I tried not to cry.
I almost threw up with nerves but I kept smiling at him, reassuring him, and repeating ‘everything’s grand’ over and over in the hope that if I said it enough times I would start believing it myself.
I held it together until he went under; I went out of the room and then almost needed sedated myself. The poor theatre nurse tried to reassure me – while fishing tissues out of her pocket– that all was but I knew this would be the longest hour of my entire existence.
I sat there in the waiting room literally watching the hands of the clock, glide super slowly on. It was hell’s bells on a bike. I never want to experience terror like that again.
As I sat I thought on those parents in the wards above who’s children have serious complaints, life-threatening illnesses. I saw many of them that day – sitting beside cots with their precious babies hooked up to beeping and whizzing machines, reading books to their sick sons, playing Barbie with little girls wearing oxygen tubes as well as pretty pink hair bands. My heart broke a hundred times for them and I offered up a prayer that they would find the strength to carry on from somewhere.
My boy recovered from his ordeal quite quickly. Within two hours he was sat up in bed demanding ice cream and asking if the tooth fairy had been informed of the situation. It’ll take a little while longer until my nerves recover though.
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