Unspeakable agony (From The Northern Echo)

Unspeakable agony

11:58am Thursday 14th April 2011 in Mum At Large By Ruth Campbell

IT was just as well for the dentist that, after a night with no sleep, I didn’t have the energy to burst through her door. I had also, having had the sound of the wailing and weeping and screeching and yelping of a 12-year-old boy ricocheting around my head for the past 15 hours, temporarily lost the power of speech.

Otherwise, I would have kicked in her door then and there and demanded to know why we were being kept waiting outside in the corridor when my son was in agony and our emergency appointment was supposed to be 20 minutes ago.

That is what I felt like doing. But, instead, I sat there meekly with my head in my hands listening to Roscoe, his fist in his mouth, yelping in pain. A lack of sleep plays havoc with your brain. And it is hard to watch your child in agony, especially when you feel it is your fault. I am the one, after all, who is responsible for his diet and for making sure he cleans his teeth properly.

I may as well have whacked him in the face with a baseball bat, I thought, as I watched him clawing the kitchen table in desperation.

I have witnessed all my boys suffering pain of one sort or another over the years, whether through accident, illness or injury, but nothing as bad as this.

Paracetamol and Calpol didn’t have any effect. I tried hot water bottles and hot drinks as a distraction.

But still he shrieked in pain. The first emergency appointment we could get was for 9.30am the next day.

Roscoe couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep. No one in the house slept.

“Roscoe, will you just keep quiet and stop making such a fuss,” one of his unsympathetic older brothers moaned at one point in the early hours.

But I could tell he wasn’t putting this on. This searing pain was so real I could almost feel it. Or was that just my guilt? I gave him some more painkillers and even strapped a pack of frozen sausages to his cheek at one point, urging him to try to be quiet.

“I can’t go on. You don’t know what it’s like. You have no idea of the pain I’m in,” he lashed out at me. I had to bite my tongue and force myself not to remind him that I had given birth to him. Now was not the time, I thought.

I searched the freezer for something I could put inside his mouth that might help. By this stage, I would have tried anything. I would have stuffed a frozen chicken in there if I thought it would have done any good. At about 4am, I persuaded him to have a hot bath, thinking that would help. It didn’t.

By 5am, I was desperate for sleep and, as he screeched in my ear for the umpteeth time, I snapped: “Roscoe, I need to sleep. I have to be able to drive you to the dentist’s in the morning.”

That made him wail even louder.

And then everyone else in the house started groaning: “Be quiet. Can’t you just go to sleep?”

Our appointment couldn’t come quickly enough. I was downstairs, dressed and ready to go at 6.30am.

We got there early. And then there was that agonising wait in the corridor.

But the dentist was fantastic.

She did a quick x-ray and pinpointed the problem instantly, located in the only two small fillings he has ever had.

“Yes, I know I’m a terrible mother, but he is son number four and it’s impossible to keep track of absolutely everything they’re eating. Honestly, they do all brush their teeth at least twice a day. But I can’t possibly watch over each and every one of them as they do it. Can I? Can I?...” I tried to explain. But the words wouldn’t come out. It was probably just as well I had not yet regained my power of speech.

Underneath each filling, some decay had been left behind, which had spread down to the root, she explained.

Each was now infected.

“You are a very unlucky boy,” she said. She gave him two injections to numb the pain immediately, along with a prescription for antibiotics.

I glanced at my ashen-faced reflection in a window when we got outside. I looked a mess. I felt as if I had just crawled out of the wreckage of a car crash. All I could think of was getting home to collapse into bed. I needed to sleep.

Roscoe, though, had perked up remarkably, bouncing back the way only children can. “I feel a lot better,” he chirped, as he got out his mobile phone. “Can you take me to meet my friends in town now?”

I didn’t respond. I had lost the power of speech again.

MY friend Dawn was baffled when her 19-year-old daughter, who is away at university, mentioned she had started spinning classes with a friend. “I thought it was so unlike her,” said Dawn, picturing them all sitting around their spinning wheels. It wasn’t until she asked if they had to bring their own flax that her daughter explained she meant high-speed, indoor cycling training...