Genius Toiling in Obscurity

Must...Control...Fist...Of... Death

If I get through my whole life without doing physical harm to a dental hygienist, it will be a testament to the power of God to sow peace even in the hearts of people who are sorely provoked.

Today's hygienist wins a special award for pissing me off on two fronts.

The first requires a little background. In my first pregnancy, I was diagnosed with thrombocytopenia, or low platelet count. Since platelets are a clotting agent, having too few can cause your blood to clot slowly--meaning you might bleed more easily, more often, and for longer than the average person. I have never had any bleeding problems, but I am usually carrying on my body a few dramatically large and multi-colored bruises that I have no memory of acquiring, whereas your normal, full-clotting type person with similar contusions would know that they had been, say, assaulted with a baseball bat or in a medium-bad car wreck. During labor and delivery, when blood is flowing anyway, having low platelets can be dangerous for the mother. For complicated reasons I won't go into right now, it can also sometimes, though not always, be dangerous for the baby (can you say, "bleeding in the brain"?). So if your platelets go lower than a certain magic number, you will be put on steroids to bring them back up.

In my first pregnancy, I was foolish and naive, and when people asked how the pregnancy was going, I would say, "It's going fine, except that I have been diagnosed with this very interesting blood disorder."

And the person would say, "What can be done for that?"

And I would say, "Oh, I'm taking prednisone."

And the person would say, invariably, "Is that safe for the baby?"

If you will take a moment to think about it, you will realize what a stupid and offensive question this is. It got so I wanted to answer like this:

Other person: Is that safe for the baby?

Su (puffs cigarette while pouring generous dollop of whisky into her double espresso): Who gives a shit?

I did actually get to the point of saying to some people, "I figure it's safer than me and the baby bleeding to death during delivery."

Please, non-pregnant people out there: if you are ever tempted to ask a pregnant woman receiving medical treatment whether it is safe for her baby, keep your mouth shut and make one or more of the following assumptions:

1. "Is this safe for the baby?" was the first question the mother asked when the doctor pulled out her prescription pad, and either:
2. There is plenty of evidence that this particular treatment is safe for the unborn; or:
3. The treatment carries some risk to the baby (or the risks are unknown) but there are compelling reasons for the mother to be on it anyway.

And if you are a pregnant mom taking medication for any condition, pregnancy-related or not, my advice is: mention it only on a need-to-know basis. To the nice woman at coffee hour after church, the correct answer to "how is your pregnancy going?" is "fine!" even if you are in fact being fully anti-coagulated because of a history of multiple miscarriages caused by a clotting disorder and are so worried about the well-being of the baby you're carrying that you are checking its heartbeat every hour with your home Doppler.

Here are some more examples of just who needs to know about your medical treatment:

Woman at church: we've covered this. No need to know.

Your regular doctor when you drop by for your flu shot: Probably needs to know.

Your mother-in-law: No need to know.

EMT pulling you out of your burning car: Needs to know.

Person who has just seen you taking a pill out of a prescription bottle and swallowing it, and who has asked, "What's that?": No need to know. The correct answer to this question is "Prenatal vitamins." Even if it's really heroin.

Dental hygienist who has just asked "are you currently taking any medications?" After this morning, I have decided that she probably does not need to know. Because here's what happened:

DH: Any medication?

Su: Prenatal vitamins. Benadryl for my allergies. 10 mg of prednisone per day.

DH: What's that for?

Su: Thrombocytopenia.

DH: What's that? [New rule: anyone who doesn't know what thrombocytopenia is probably doesn't need to know what you're taking for it.]

Su: Low platelets.

DH: Ah. (though that clearly meant nothing to her, either.)

DH snaps a bib on Su, tips the chair back, and starts the poking-with-sharp-stick phase of the cleaning. And, with Su thus immobilized and unable to speak, she delivers the following monologue:

DH: I'm surprised they'd put you on steroids when you're pregnant. That doesn't seem like a very good idea. It can't be safe for the baby. Steroids are really strong. They can be dangerous. Low platelets doesn't sound that bad.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking, "Are you my obstetrician? My hematologist? My perinatologist? My pediatrician? No? Then shut the fuck up!"

The second conversation that pissed me off is one we have every time I get my teeth cleaned. I always take Eric with me, so that he can see what goes on at the dentist and that it's nothing to be afraid of (though we don't, of course, tell him it's nothing to be afraid of, as that could plant the idea that it might be, which so far hasn't occurred to him).

Actually, she started annoying me early on, by talking to Eric like he was stupid. It was nice that she engaged him by telling him what she was doing, but she kept dumbing things down or lying to him. For instance, she told him the pointy tooth-scraper was for "counting mommy's teeth." And then, while she was doing the actual scraping, she kept telling him, "Sometimes, even when mommy brushes carefully, she might miss a spot, and some dirty stuff can build up there, and it's my job to clean it away." On and on like that. I wanted to say, "He can handle the words 'plaque' and 'tartar,' so why not give him the vocabulary?" If we all talked to each other the way some people talk to kids, we'd spend our days like this:

"Honey, do you need the thing with the four wheels that we ride in today?"

"Adrianne, when you're done with it, can I borrow that thing with the pages and the words on them that a person can read?"

But that was merely annoying. What pissed me off was her response when Eric, who was hungry because we'd been kept waiting for an hour past my appointment time and into lunchtime, announced he was hungry, fetched his security object from my bag, and leaned against my side, doing his full-on Linus impression: cuddly T-shirt of Daddy's held to the cheek with right hand, left thumb tucked firmly into his mouth.

DH: Do you suck your thumb a lot? Does he suck his thumb a lot?

Me: Only as much as he needs to.

DH: [Usual speech about how bad it is and how we need to stop him from doing it. Now. The usual speech includes: moving teeth out of their proper places, and destroying the underlying bone structure of the face.]

Now, I've been hearing this from the dentist since Eric was six months old, and since I never take anyone's word for anything, I did some research. In peer-reviewed medical journals. Which generally say:

• Most kids stop sucking their thumbs when they're three or four.
• Sucking their thumbs does cause teeth to move (Eric has a perfect thumb-shaped opening between two of his top left teeth, and I will concede that those teeth did not come in that way).
• If kids stop sucking their thumbs by the age of ten, this movement is very unlikely to require any treatment at all, as the teeth will generally move back.
• If the teeth don't move back, normal orthodontic treatment that the kid would probably need anyway will take care of it.
• It is a lot harder than my dentist says it is to cause damage to the underlying bone structure of the face.
• Even if we thought thumb-sucking was really terrible, there doesn't seem to be any way to stop kids from doing it. So it's better not to make an issue of it.

I would be happy to provide references to some journal articles to anyone who asks for them.

So I told the hygienist I had researched the question and was content that Eric's thumb-sucking was doing him no harm.

She said: We see kids in here every day and we see the terrible damage they have done to their teeth by sucking their thumbs.

I said: The peer-reviewed medical journal articles I've read don't support claims of serious damage in most cases.

She said: You need to stop listening to just anybody (!) and listen to me.

And then she went on to tell Eric that he should stop sucking his thumb because he is a "big boy" and "only babies" suck their thumbs. And then she said to me, "If that blanket he's holding is encouraging his thumb-sucking, you need to make it disappear some night while he's sleeping."

When I told David that, he said I should have said, "Oh, are you a child psychologist? Because I really prefer to have my teeth cleaned by a dental hygienist."

What I actually did was pull her hand out of my mouth and say, "We are finished with this topic now."

Which is what I'm going to say from now on the moment anyone brings it up. Because if I get this lecture one more time--and, worse, if anybody tries to get to Eric directly and make him feel bad about his thumb-sucking--I'm going to forget that I am a religiously-convinced pacifist, and I will start swinging. And I hear that punching a dental professional can do serious damage to the bones of the hand.

[UPDATE: I'm not the only one with hygienist problems. I'd gladly break a couple of the small bones of the hand on this one.]

Posted by Su Penn at February 2, 2004 02:22 PM | TrackBack