The painful tooth
There are days when you discover that your baby daughter can finally call you “daddy” instead of calling you “orange.” There are days when you discover that your daughter can launch into her own impromptu song and dance number after watching marathon episodes of Dora the Explorer. And then there are days when you discover that your daughter is not invulnerable.
Although she seems to teeter-totter around on her nine-month-old newly utilitarian pair of legs, I suspect that my daughter may have been crossbred with a Formula One car (I am guessing my professional race car driver in-laws had something to do with it). Otherwise, I cannot explain why she can seem to stumble around faster than Usain Bolt, most land-based mammals and commercial aircrafts. Unfortunately, my little girl has yet to develop a working set of brakes (which I also attribute to my speed demon in-laws).
Because of this, I am perennially worried that her overspeeding legs might run her into trouble. And I don’t mean a speeding ticket. When I am in the office, I harbor a lingering dread that one day I will receive a frantic call from my wife wailing “Our baby tripped all over herself and banged up her shins!” or “Our baby ran into the edge of the tabletop, bumped her head and now has a bukol (bump)!” or “Our baby ran off with Dora and Boots the monkey to recover the treasure chest that was stolen by the Pirate Pigs!”
But there is reason that I will never get that phone call. And that is because my wife does not do “wail.” You see, my wife — God bless her and her genetic predisposition — has the balls in our family (my balls are merely there for aesthetic purposes). When it comes to crisis situations at our home, she is better equipped than most rural clinics. We both play our respective roles at home: she is the emergency medical technician slash guidance counselor slash crisis public relations handler. Meanwhile, I am the entertainer slash couch potato slash family dog.
The other reason that I will never get that phone call is because calmness is not part of my curriculum vitae. When there is a minor domestic incident that she can easily handle, she chooses to momentarily conceal it from me lest she exacerbate my stress-induced migraines, high LDL cholesterol levels, and receding hairlines. My wife knows that if I found out that my daughter was injured in any way, she may need to shoot me with tranquilizer darts to prevent me from going into hysterics. Instead, my wife likes to keep the domestic situation mum and only reveal to me the incident after the situation has been fully resolved (and, in the process, prevent further hair loss).
Thus, one Friday evening I came home family dog-tired from work and wanted nothing better to do than to sit on my potato couch and play with my daughter: I spied my baby mesmerized in front of the TV, bobbing her head and strutting to the opening theme song of Dora for the 634th time. I snatched her up in my arms and proceeded to smother her with family dog kisses. When she tried to swat me away after I had slobbered her face, I suddenly came across an abominably large bruise on her lower lip.
My eyes grew large as the hair on my scalp retreated another inch. “Maaaaa-mmeeeee!” I called out to my wife in Ilonggo singsong fashion so that my daughter could not appreciate the undertone of dread in my voice. “What happened to the baby’s lips?”
“Sweetheart,” she answered in a reassuring tone. “It’s nothing serious.” My wife explained to me in her characteristically calm and measured fashion that my daughter had escaped the clutches of her yaya and made beeline for the living room to — guess what? — watch Dora. But as she sped towards the living room, she accidentally slammed her mouth against the top of a small cabinet and busted her lip.
My wife grabbed my hand and held it firmly. “We’ve already applied an ice pack to her lips. The swelling on her lips will recede in a few days.” She squeezed my hand tighter. “Now, don’t make me take out the tranquilizer gun.”
So the hair on my scalp temporarily regained some ground. I scooped up my daughter again and slobbered all over her face. “Smile for daddy, my love! Please! Because daddy is working so hard for your graduate school education.” And my daughter, who has inherited my dominant entertainer genes, gladly obliged.
And as her mouth widened to an ear-to-ear grin, that is when I saw it.
A gaping hole where one of her right front teeth used to be.
My upper lip curled into a snarl.
“Maaaaa-meeeeeee!!!!!”
I am not a man who likes to make tampo (sulk) or rant or go stark, raving mad, particularly because all these negative emotions have consequences to health and hair. But when I saw that her front tooth had been cut diagonally almost to the gums, my anger exploded to gamma-irradiated levels.
“Where... is... her... tooth!” I growled.
What father wouldn’t have gone ballistic? After all, my poor daughter had bumped her lip in the morning and I got home by dinnertime. During all that time — after cleaning up blood from her chin, after calming her down, after applying an ice pack to her swollen lips — no one had noticed that she was missing a front tooth? My 18-month-old daughter didn’t have that many teeth to begin with!
Several hours later, one of the household help had found the chipped tooth embedded in a lampin (washcloth) that was used to wipe away the blood from her lips. My wife promptly dipped the dislodged tooth into a cup of milk and stuck it into the freezer. No, my wife was not making a popsicle. But she had heard from her own mom — a firm believer in natural remedies — that it was possible to reattach a chipped tooth to one’s mouth as long as it was placed in milk (although her mom was silent as to whether the milk had to be full cream, skimmed or powdered). Although I was unsure that this solution would save the baby’s tooth, my wife said my suggestion — to use epoxy glue to reattach the tooth — might be a knee-jerk reaction.
That evening, I couldn’t bear to look at the wallpaper photo of my daughter on my cell phone with a big golden toothy grin. So I placed my cell phone beside the milk tooth popsicle in the freezer, sat down all by my lonesome on the potato coach, and played the traditional game of finger-pointing: Was it the fault of my yaya’s senior reflexes, that weren’t fast limber enough to catch up with my baby before she rammed against the cabinet? Was it the fault of my wife who had a cabinet built whose height was coincidentally the same level as the baby’s mouth? Or was it the GMA administration because we can always blame whatever happened over the last nine years on them?
Or was it my fault? Was it my fault for not being home that day to make her bantay (watch over her)? Was it my fault for not hiring a platoon of yayas to play patintero with my daughter on revolving shifts? Was it my fault for not installing several hundred closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras around our house so that I could remotely monitor my daughter’s every movement? God knows that those CCTV will come in handy once she hits her dating years.
And who knows what consequences that gaping hole might bring? My mind ran through 634 scenarios. The bacteria from food particles that could seep in through the pulp near her exposed broken tooth might infect her gums and lead all the way to her brain! The gap in her tooth could create a whistling sound that would make her sound like that beaver in Winnie the Pooh and affect her speech patterns! The loss of most of her front tooth might make her too embarrassed to smile and affect her overall self-confidence for years to come! And the loss of her big golden, toothy grin would be a major, major blow for a future Miss Universe contender! Gak! Where’s that industrial epoxy! Now!
Thankfully, all that stressing was merely another exercise in promoting hair loss. After my wife and I brought our daughter for a visit to a pediatric dentist, he assured both of us (well, me mostly) that reattaching the chipped-off tooth with industrial epoxy was probably not the best option. The dentist also assured me he could create a composite that would not only resemble her original front tooth but would also seal off the real part of the tooth from getting infected with bacteria.
So after a visit to the hospital, copious amounts of tears shed (mine) as they carried our sedated bundle of joy into the operating room, a brief fainting spell (or at least that’s what they told me), and a terrible 90 minutes of waiting, they finally brought my daughter back to the recovery room. My daughter was still sedated (and probably looking for pirate pigs with Dora and Boots) but the procedure was a success and, more importantly, she was fine. And the best news of them all: they had restored my baby’s big, golden toothy grin with a brand-spanking new titanium-reinforced, nuclear-powered, ultra-magnetic front tooth. That was all worth it. (Should be, since the procedure was worth the price of my housing loan.)
However, when we brought our little girl back home from her dental surgery, I still harbored that lingering feeling of dread: I knew that even if her new tooth was titanium-reinforced, nuclear-powered and ultra-magnetic, it did not mean it was childhood-proof. Given this, I am currently undertaking measures that will prevent future domestic incidents in my house which include installing speed bumps and traffic lights in the living room, enveloping the house in bubble wrap, and temporarily encasing my daughter in a porous but hard plastic bubble so that she will never get another chipped tooth, insect bit or airborne virus until she develops her mutant healing abilities and adamantium claws.
At this point, you may ask: Whatever happened to the chipped tooth that had been drowned in milk and turned into a frozen delight? Will we be saving it for posterity and possible auction after she becomes Miss Universe? Well, if technology proceeds at its current pace, we may one day take that tooth out of its cryogenic state, reanimate it with a hundred million volts of electricity, and then give that poor chipped front tooth a life of its own.
On that day, the tooth will take its revenge on that stupid cabinet.
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For comments, suggestions, or if you would like to help subsidize the cost of my daughter’s dental bill, please email ledesma.rj@gmail.com or visit www.rjledesma.net or follow rjled on Twittter.
