I did not know how to say "pliers" in Japanese. For sure, my Japanese was passable. I could say "another beer," and "please cook this some more," and "your mother has an outie bellybutton." I knew the Japanese words for almost every animal I could think of, plus the sounds they made. At one point, at the request of a college friend back home, I learned how to say "I want to take your panties off with my teeth" although much to my friend's chagrin and the horror of the Japanese exchange student he tried the phrase on, it evidently translated more as "I would like your panties to chew on." The slap was justified either way.
At one point I probably knew "hammer" and "screwdriver," but I never knew the word for pliers, so when the Japanese doctor called that word over his shoulder to the nurse, I didn't immediately take off running. Or hobbling, as the situation would have had it. I did recognize the next two phrases, "Don't look" and "This is going to hurt" although to my credit, I don't believe I had ever heard them consecutively before.
There's not a lot of pleasant things a doctor can do with a set of pliers, but until last Friday, I thought having an intern in Japan pull a three-inch surgical pin from my foot would be the worst I would encounter for a while. I was wrong.
On Friday, our dentist used a pair of pliers to pull Lila's chipped tooth from her mouth.
In the short time between this and a dentist's appointment, the tooth became abscessed. For those of you keeping score at home, that's a flood, two cross-country flights, and dental surgery all in the past two weeks. And you wonder why I'm not answering my email.
You might think that there's some sophisticated method for extracting a tooth from the upper jaw of a two-year-old. You'd be wrong. Apparently all you need is a set of pliers and the determination to keep on pulling until the tooth is out. And a dad to hold the child down for the duration. Of course, there are preliminaries, x-rays and the like. Dental x-rays for a two-year-old are exactly the same as for adults, with the notable exception of the two-year-old part, which renders it more comparable to teaching a cat to drink mojitos through a straw. Truth be told, Lila didn't mind all the failed x-ray attempts and remained a good sport despite her growing annoyance at our insistence that she keep that blasted mouthpiece in her mouth and not look inside the x-ray camera whenever it beeped. Is there such a thing as eye cancer? Nevermind. I just Googled it and now I shall never sleep again. Perchance Lila's right eye, at least, was shielded from the harmful x-rays by her cataract, which is a topic for a whole 'nuther post.
Please, God, allow me to die before my little girl is toothless and blind, which has all the signs of happening sometime before Kindergarten.
The final step before the tooth was wrenched free was the needle. The purpose of the needle was, I was informed, to deaden my darling's gums, although I can't believe that pulling out the tooth without anesthetic could have been any worse than the needle itself which, for reasons only disclosed to dentists and their ilk, needed to be stuck in her gums and wiggled around for eleventy million years. On the plus side, once the anesthetic took effect, it was kind of fun to watch Lila try to cry, only to be stopped dead by an upper lip which, to her, was now roughly the size of a Buick.
"Waah--ooh! By lib! By lib beels bunny!"
The pliers came next, and that was followed by the hole, which was followed by the blood. All in all, I would rank it somewhere in the top ten of Things I Do Not Want To Do Again, in between #6 (Being strip searched in a Texas/Mexico border town) and #4 (Moving to New Jersey).
And one more thing: "Pliers" in Japanese? Penchi. Hopefully you'll never need to know that.
