Zoë Needs Oral Surgery

Baby girl has pretty bad cavities and needs a root canal on a few molars. Yikes!

Her procedure was set for today. First, they wanted to take extra x-rays to confirm that she definitely needs root canals on the two molars since the previous x-rays were slightly blurry. She was super anxious at first, but Jeric helped calm her nerves and even made her smile!

She was supposed to have oral sedation since we were very against IV sedation (we didn't want to put her to sleep at such an early age). Of course, they failed to let us know that she also needs to be 30 lbs in order to take the oral sedation. They should've noticed that she's pretty tiny for her age at her last visit and weighed her then. But they didn't. Well, when they weighed her today, she was 29.2 lbs. Ugh. There was no giving her oral sedation. Since that was no longer an option and we were adamant with not having her put to sleep for the procedure, they offered us a step below Oral sedation, which is good ol' laughing gas. We figured that since we were here, we might as well give it a try.

The dental assistant also informed us that they would only be wrapping her shoulders down and not her arms and hands/legs unless it was necessary. When we were brought in to the Nitrous Oxide room, they did start off just wrapping her shoulders down.

But they didn't even start any procedure yet. Instead, they took more x-rays. Then, when it was time to have her breath in the Nitroux Oxide gas, they had me step out of the room and then wrapped her whole body up!

That already started to freak her out because she felt restrained. Then, when they put the Nitrous Oxide mask over her, she hated it. It was so sad too. I was outside of the room and I heard her little pleas for us to help her. She wanted out of the restraining wraps and the Nitrous Oxide mask off her face. It was even worse because she had to calm down so that they slowly switched out of Nitrous Oxide and had her breath in Oxygen instead so that the remaining Nitrous Oxide clears out. Of course, they also had to have her calm down and stop crying so that she can breathe in the Oxygen properly. Luckily, she calmed down and they were able to take off the mask within reasonable time.

This meant no oral surgery today and we opted to wait until after the holidays to see if she's at the 30lb limit so that she can have the oral sedation. But I really don't know how she's going to react since this was super traumatic. Poor baby girl.