My Weird Day When I Will Write About Anything
A busman’s holiday of cases at my dental clinic, and my parents-in-law's booster vaccine/toilet cleaning argument
The chinless helmet argument
A patient came in after a scooter accident today. He slipped and fell from his scooter and hit his chin.
He was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident, but his helmet had no chin.
The victim said he skidded and fell because of trying to avoid colliding with another, unhelmeted scooter driver, who was swerving away from a police surprise checkpoint where they were checking on helmets and masks. My patient, the accident victim, successfully avoided the unhelmeted swerving rider but skidded and fell. He reached my clinic, still in his ripped sweater and jeans, a half-hour after his tetanus shot at a local medical store.
Red circle and arrow: area of fractured right side condyle. (A condyle is the round prominence at the end of a bone and is on the left side of the x-ray above. )
Green circle: the right side, sound condyle. This I circled for comparison of the fractured area on the opposite side condyle.
Blue circle: the missing teeth which (in my opinion) contributed to the impact leading to a jaw fracture on the opposite side of the missing teeth.
He couldn’t bring his upper and lower teeth together, and sure enough, the right condyle of his lower jaw was fractured.
Could the fracture have been avoided?
Yes, if the patient hadn’t had five lower teeth on the left side extracted: the chin wouldn’t have transferred the impact to the lower jaw…
Or if he had worn a helmet with a chin.
How will doctors at his hospital treat this accident case? You can’t plaster over a jawbone!
They’ll do what we call IMF. Not the International Monetary Fund, but Intermaxillary Fixation.
The hospital docs will tie up his upper and lower teeth such that they stay in the bite. That way, his jaw will heal in 2–3 weeks.
So how will he eat, if his lower and upper teeth are tied together by doctors?
He will eat through a feeding tube, which he’ll suck on through the gaps in his teeth — where he has missing teeth.
A pretty strong argument for a helmet with a chin, isn't it?
The father with the unrealistic expectations of his four-year-old son
So my weird day didn’t just end there, more people walked in. The next guy was a bespectacled father of a four-year-old kid who had been up all night for two nights with a toothache.
The dad kept demanding that the child sit on the dental chair. The kid didn’t oblige. The child just saw me in my beekeeper-like PPE kit and wanted to make a run for it.
Omicron makes it hard for me to emote with kids. The PPE suit doesn’t help, and this kid was tired, in pain, hungry and sleepy. He didn’t want to sit on the chair, and his dad, instead of empathizing, called his son’s full name out loud and demanded that his son sit on the chair and get an x-ray clicked, to boot.
I couldn’t deal with the way the fearful kid clung to his dad. I just gave up, then and there. I convinced the dad that it isn’t a good idea to prise a kid’s mouth open forcefully when the kid is uncooperative. We needed to coax him onto the chair, not give a command which he was in no mood to follow.
Worse come to worst, a dental hospital could always do his work under general anesthesia.
Sometimes you need to run away to come back and fight another day. The war against dental decay ain’t won in a day.
Discussing Omicron recoverees with muscle stiffness over coffee with my root canal dentist
With the festival coming up, I had no appointed cases this morning. Between the accident case and the kid, I got a call from another dentist, my dentist, the one who does my root canals! He was in the area and wanted to visit us — my husband and me, at work.
Here I must digress to explain that my husband is also a dentist, who ordinarily works with me in our clinic, which has two dental chairs — but my husband wasn’t on duty when this dentist visited our clinic today.
Of course, I didn’t say this when my root canal dentist called to say that he was awful close to my clinic and so could he drop in? I just invited him right over.
One must never be rude to one’s dentist.
Why do I have a dentist who isn’t my husband when my husband is also a dentist?
Because I needed root canals and in my clinic, I am the root canal specialist — not my husband! So when I needed a root canal of my own, I had to call the root canal files supplier and ask him who buys the best products (apart from me). The supplier provided the name of this dentist, who has done three root canals for me so far, in his own clinic of course.
It has always been me who visits his clinic — I have never had him over to my place before today.
He’s always the perfect gentleman and a wonderful practitioner, and I have had comfortable and sound root canal work done by him.
When he arrived at my clinic, we nervously removed our masks for a cup of coffee. I have just two ceramic cups in my clinic. My husband’s cup is red, and mine is blue. I hazily noted that while serving the coffee, my assistants had chosen to serve me in my usual blue cup, and our guest was served in my husband’s red cup.
My dentist revealed that the new Omicron was causing backache and body stiffness in two recoverers he knew personally. I wondered aloud if that was due to the slow uptake of oxygen from dyspneic lungs by a heart that suddenly found the oxygen supply low? As dentists, we could only guess and hope that we maintained all the precautions and prevented COVID — long COVID or not.
Then my dentist was on his way and I was left wondering what else would happen today.
By evening (see photo above) I had a better schedule of appointments and did a root canal and then saw this girl, whose case I started just before my gallbladder surgery on September 6.
She’s coming along nicely. That’s what I love about orthodontic work. It isn’t like gym or nutrition transformations which depend on motivation. The braces stay on, the teeth will shift! By golly, they will.
I got home after work and overheard my parents-in-law fighting.
My dad-in-law was to have his COVID booster vaccine the next day, and he wanted my mum-in-law to go with him and take her booster at the same time as him.
She refused, saying that since he was a general surgeon, and he treated patients, he needed a vaccine and she saw no reason why she should take a booster because of him.
He fought back, saying that if she didn’t take a booster, he wouldn’t allow her to use the same bathroom as he did.
Boom!
All hell broke loose. My mum-in-law, all 92.4 lbs of her, threatened to throw my father-in-law out of the house for saying something so rude.
All-these-years-I-have-cleaned-up-your-filth-in-the-bathroom-and-this-is-how-you-treat-me? How dare you, and wait until I call Bobby and tell him what you just said!!!
(Bobby is my husband’s elder brother, based in Hyderabad, over 2000 miles from here. Bobby is a man of very few words, unlike his parents. Both his parents allow him to play the referee over the phone in altercations. After all, the man has an MBA!)
Even after my weird day, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
Poor Bobby: he misses the ring-side seat I have.
He doesn’t even read my blog!
