Well, the day finally arrived. Lia had her oral surgery yesterday to extract her two baby, canine teeth and to anchor tiny chains onto her adult canine teeth that are her still inside her gums. Although she was very nervous, she acted as cool as a cucumber on the drive up to Federal Way after school and while waiting in the consultation room. After talking with the nurse and then meeting the oral surgeon, she was whisked away to the operating room while I sat in the waiting room. The entire procedure took about 1.5 hours from beginning to end. After everything was over, the nurse pushed her out to our car in a wheelchair in the pouring rain with me at their side. Lia was pretty entertaining on the drive home as she was coming off of the anesthesia. She was super talkative and giddy (which is no longer the case with my teenage daughter) and kept on repeating how hungry she was, how fat her lips and nose felt, and how she really wanted to find the holes in her mouth where her teeth used to be, but couldn't. It was humorous to say the least. By the time we got home, it was past 7 p.m. and so she ate a late dinner after not eating anything since 10 o'clock that morning. At 8 p.m., she went into the bathroom to rinse out her mouth and that's when the trouble started.
Since Lia was not having adult teeth extracted, the nurse assured us that this surgery was not as big of a deal since the sockets were not going to be that deep. As a result, she basically told us that Lia could do everything like normal from the very beginning--she could brush her teeth, eat normal foods, etc. Apparently this was not good advice as the spitting that Lia did right after dinner broke loose the clotting that had already happened after her surgery. As a result, she started bleeding right away and it did not stop for 4.5 hours! It was pretty stressful and quite scary. While Lia was spitting (and right before the bleeding started), I began reading the paperwork that came home in the little "goodie bag" that the nurse gave us. All of the directions were for extractions (that the nurse told us we could basically ignore) and one of the first ones stated NOT to spit for the next several days as this can break blood clots. This was very frustrating to read as it was too late! The goodie bag only came with a tiny pack of two strips of gauze which is ridiculous since Lia burned through many pieces of gauze over the next few hours as each one would get completely saturated with blood within 20 to 30 minutes. Luckily, we had two large packs of gauze in our first aide kit that we were able to use. Ron helped Lia with all of this until about 10 p.m. while I was still cleaning up the kitchen, putting the other children to bed, and getting ready for bed myself. After that, I joined in and eventually took over. When the bleeding hadn't stopped by 10:30, I phoned the on call doctor's number that the nurse told me to call in case of an emergency. When there was no option to talk to anyone live, I got pretty scared and decided to follow the final suggestion in the paperwork that said to try using wet, black tea bags as a last resort since the tannic acid in the tea can act like a clotting agent for the blood. So, at 10:40, I left our house in my pajamas to drive to Walmart to buy this kind of tea. Luckily, I got there 15 minutes before closing and was able to find what I needed. After coming back home, we started Lia on three, 30-minute rounds of tea bags from 11 to 12:30. Ron was asleep at this point and so I had to help and supervise Lia from this time on. Lia was so brave and barely cried through most of this, but was so tired. She just kept on saying how badly she wanted to go to sleep, but couldn't since her mouth was still bleeding. At 11:30, we started to see a little progress and, by midnight, one of her two teeth had stopped bleeding. At this point, we were hopeful enough that Lia said that I could go to bed while she did one more round of tea bags.
When I checked on her the next morning, she looked a little like Dracula as she had dried blood that had spilled out of one side of her mouth while sleeping. The poor thing. She said that she was able to go to sleep by 12:30 and slept until 8 this morning. I was so relieved and so proud of her for being so brave during this entire process and also so annoyed at this nurse who had prepared us so poorly with the post-op instructions. Lia has spent the entire day in bed today only eating soft foods although the nurse told us that this wasn't necessary. She has watched four episodes of Stranger Things 4 that was released at midnight (perfect timing!) and even took a really, long afternoon nap which is unheard of for her. In addition, she has been in very little pain and has only required over-the-counter Tylenol and Motrin to ease the pain instead of the prescription pain medicine that the doctor prescribed for her. She still has three days off from school due to the 4-day, Memorial Weekend our school district gave us which is a good thing as I hope that she can be rested and healed enough to report back to school and track practice on Tuesday.
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