Big Balls and Braces and Wires, Oh My!
I used to enjoy playing Doctor when I was younger. As a parent, playing doctor takes on a whole new meaning, and usually involves more blood than I remember from my youth. This past weekend, though, I had a new experience – I got to play Dentist.
Now, the Reigning Queen of Pink has her share of medical issues, by which I mean that her file is larger than mine and she’s had tests and surgeries and whatnot that I’d never heard of, and among these many and varied conditions she happens to be missing a few teeth here and there, by which I mean most of them. In an effort to correct this, over the course of many years and thousands of dollars, she currently has braces on her top teeth, with springs to move them around her head like tiny masticating bumper cars.
Or she did, until Sunday when one of the damn things came loose, teeth I mean, and fell out. The Reigning Queen of Pink reports for the record that having a tooth that is no longer connected to your mouth, yet still anchored in place by your braces, is not comfortable. And by “not comfortable,” she meant, “please call the emergency orthodontist number Right NOW.” Calling the 17 numbers needed to get to a human on a weekend, I was finally offered this sage advice: “Well, can you cut the wire?”
Wut? I’m sorry, first, don’t you have to go to school for something like 6 years for that? And second, didn’t we just pay for that wire? I thought they were expensive or something. Nevertheless, there I was sterilizing my massive boltcutters and needle-nosed pliers and laying her under the big lights, Open Up and Say Ah.
The wire on the far side was straightforward, if hard to see. The second cut was to the wire on the front side, easier to see but with a big spring coiled up on it. I clipped the wire not knowing how much tension was on the spring. I was NOT prepared for the wire – tooth and all – to bounce off up at me and go flying across the room; with the bloody stump of the tooth and the wire and spring attached, it looked like something out of Steven King’s The Dentist.
The Tooth Fairy agreed that since she only has 12 teeth in her whole head, they ought to be pro-rated, and that having the Flying Loose Tooth Of Doom was a lot to deal with, and so they settled on a new bathing suit.
So today when I called home to see what the actual orthodontist said or did, they were still out with the followup Tooth Fairy visit (which bodes well for how it went), and I got to speak to the 13-yr-old Human Tape Recorder. She let me know that SOBUMD and the RQoP were still out, and then announced: “I was listening to AC/DC in 5th period today!”
BUMD: What? Why were they playing AC/DC in school?
HTR: No, just on my headphones.
BUMD: You found the 5th period lecture to be, perhaps, less than scintillating?
HTR: No, we had speech arts, and we didn’t have a studio, and so I had nothing better to do.
BUMD: I doubt that, but we’ll let that slide. Do I want to know which song?
HTR: Oh, it was great! I put it on a random selection from a random album, and it was called “Big Balls!” I was rolling on the floor laughing, and I wondered if anyone else could hear it… It goes like this…
BUMD: No, no, thank you, I remember *very well* how it goes, thank you. I’ll talk to you when I get home…
We hung up, with her still humming snatches of Big Balls, some of which are held for charity, and some for fancy dress, as I’m sure you, too, Gentle Reader, remember all too well. AC/DC, still corrupting the youth of America 36 years later. She’ll be humming that for weeks. Rock on!
It’s been more than 30 years since I heard this, and all the words came back to me in an instant. I couldn’t sing along because I was laughing too hard, but still…
Nice to know today’s youth is being corrupted in the classic style. :-)
I can’t believe they made you cut the wire yourself. Didn’t you pay for their summer home in order to have them do that??? LOL at “The Dentist”. I bet I told you this before but in case I didn’t you should know that I opened a dental practice on a concrete bench in the playground at school when I was in Grade 1.
I worked Pro Bono. My expertise consisted exclusively of yanking reluctant teeth out of the skulls of mercenary 6 year olds. Ironically I would faint at even the hint of a mention of blood in health class but mouth blood never gave me a moment’s pause. To this day, my husband and friends call me whenever a tooth needs a’pulling. I make house calls. On Sunday nights! And I am still not paid. Which is sad, because at least 3 of my kids are going to need major orthodontia one of these fine days. I like your daughter pro rating her teeth. She has a business mind. I appreciate that. If this tale had been about MY daughter it would have been all about the blood curdling screaming and the “do something about it!!! DON’T TOUCH ME!!” insanity. Your daughter sounds like the essence of composure. Congratulations on opening your very own Little
Shop of Horrors. ;)
@Diane, that’s what I was thinking as well, just as soon as I made sure she wasn’t singing along out loud in the middle of a 7th Grade classroom…
@Kirsty, that’s awesome! See, at least you had had some practice with playing Dentist – it was a completely new experience for me, aside from being bitten once or twice in incidents the details of which I’d prefer not to go into in a public forum. (Let’s just say I have interesting scars.) But still, yes, the RQoP pulls off the “essence of composure” bit pretty well – I think it’s a by product of having so many procedures done. SOBUMD took them all to get flu shots a while ago; Number One Son was *very* nervous and upset. The RQoP, younger by 2 years, calmed him right down with: “Here, you do it like this. Watch,” and held out her arm for the shot, stood there as though nothing was happening, and didn’t move or flinch until the tech was done. The boy was shocked into going next, and not crying. She’s a trooper.
kudos to RQoP for her composure and business acumen and to the HRT for her music appreciation. love it!