Orange County Sleep Dentistry

Baby on Board Means Less Room for Emotional Baggage

The Sous Chef’s best friend just had a beautiful baby girl—no surprise here; Mommy and Daddy both look like movie stars—and my wife, Goggy, and I visited them the next day in the hospital.

The women were hovering over the poor little infant, who must have been thinking she had been delivered into a world of people with huge heads and silly smiles. I turned to Daddy, a hard-charging entrepreneur with his own tech business.

“This is going to change your life in so many ways you can’t imagine … all for the better,” I said. “Unless you like to sleep … otherwise, all for the better.”

Well, that’s my take.

Researchers, however, have been pumping out studies for the past 40 years showing that having a child may not be the blissful occasion that many couples expect it to be. They discovered it could turn out to be a challenging period. ( Do ya think? ) Those same studies reveal that as many as two-thirds of couples report deterioration in their relationship after the new baby’s arrival.

I don’t discount the studies, but I don’t get it. New parents figure to bond into a deeper union focused on the same goal: Doing everything in their power to give the precious little bundle every shot at happiness.

Yes, having a baby is an eye-opener … even when your lids are trying to slam shut. It also means a life-altering change of perspective, a realization of what’s really important and what’s a load of crap you shouldn’t fuss over.

The boss is a jerk? Lost your best client? This stuff used to drive you nuts for weeks, but only a crying baby can make you lose sleep now. And for every bad day at the office, there’s always that tot waiting at home for a bedtime story or a bath. (In my experience, it’s impossible to feel stress while bathing a baby … unless its head slips under or something.)

When the Stay-at-Home-Mom-with-the-Master's-Degree was 2, she fell in the driveway and demolished one of her perfect little front teeth. A half-hour later, the dentist was yanking out the remaining shards—without any anesthetic—and Goggy and I were probably in more agony than our little one. The dentist—who at one point asked, “Can you see well enough, Mr. Weyler?” as I hovered over the chair … and I don’t think he really cared if I had a good view—tried to ease our distress. “It was going to fall out in a few years anyway,” he said, smiling.

Prevent Dentistry Disasters With ... - Orange County Dentist

Budding dentists spend eight years attending college studying problems related with teeth, the dental procedures and the way to diagnose the problems. Thus we quite often believe that simply because they have a lot of years of learning behind them, they can hardly go wrong. Yet you can find many cases reported where some or other dental procedure went horribly wrong as well as the patients died or gotten permanently scarred. Thus we must remember that dentists are after all humans and are prone to making mistakes.

The Dental Procedures That Can Fail

Even as we may know, the root canal is a regular dental procedure and many people will have it done without a hitch. Yet there have been instances when the treatment had gone wrong and led to the patients ending up suffering from bruising, jaw swelling and pain.

Similarly, tooth extraction is a very common procedure. Since quite a few patients are not comfortable with the extraction, many dentists prefer using general anesthesia to put the patients to sleep during the tooth surgery. While most of them will usuallywake up when the surgery is done, some cases reported show that there have been patients who definitely have died after slipping into a coma.

It’s the same with orthodontics. Statistics tell that eighty percent of teenagers need to wear braces. Again the majority of them put them on sans any problem, but some have experienced mouth swelling and pain.

Pediatric Dentistry Ending in Disaster: Real World Examples

It’s a sad case that lots of the victims of dental procedures happen to be children. A girl from Chicago, only five years old, died in 2006 after caps and fillings were placed on her teeth. It transpired that the reason of the death had been that the dentist had applied three times the normal dose of sedative. A lawsuit was filed against the dentist and the court revoked his license to administer general anesthesia permanently. The family was paid damages, however they lost their daughter, a loss that could so easily have been avoided.

Another incident happened in Virginia only last year. A 6 year-old boy went into cardiac arrest while the dentist was putting caps on his teeth. He was declared dead shortly after being taken to the hospital. Apart from asthma, the boy had not had any major health problem. Investigation on the case is still on and no charges has been filed yet.

Orange Coast Magazine

Orange Coast Magazine

Orange Coast Magazine

CDA journal of the California Dental Association

CDA journal