The Tooth Fairy Arrives Early

The last splice of normalcy I remember was I turned to start running the boys’ bath. The next thing I know Peter is on the bathroom tile, crying, face up like a turtle put on his back. Sam looks up at me guiltily and immediately launches into a litany of apologies. Elise and I had read recently that a toddler apologizes to deflect anger or punishment, more of a defense mechanism than anything else, though these were sincere. After I looked at Pete, I told Sam to go get his mother. Elise heard me from the other room and knew it couldn’t have been good. Rarely, if ever, do I call for back-up.

He hit his mouth on the toilet. Later, I would find one of his two front teeth on the bathroom floor, completely intact, root and all, as though it had been just slipped out. I put the tooth in a Ziploc baggie. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it or if it could even be saved. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I always hear people say when you lose something put it on ice, because they might be able to sew it back on. Doctors can transplant faces, so surely they could just stick the tooth back in, right?

I asked Elise to take Pete so I could look in his mouth. When that didn’t work, I took him back and put him on the counter. He sat there and let me tip his head up so I could see his top teeth.

“Did he have front teeth?”

Elise started crying.

I asked Elise to make a bottle. I changed Pete’s diaper and put a onesie on him and got him ready to go to the hospital. Elise called a good friend to come watch Sam. It was 6:30. We got stuck in rush hour traffic on the way to Santa Lucia at the tip of Asa Sul or the “South Wing” of the Plano Piloto that is Brasilia. I stayed calm. There was blood, which, as a habit, I usually don’t do well. But as I was stuck in traffic, wishing the taillights in front of me away, I could feel an anxiousness well up inside of me. There had been, perhaps, just a bit too much stress this week, even a week shortened by the Memorial Day holiday. Maybe I need to rewind to Tuesday night by way of explanation.

Tuesday evening after work I assumed duty as the on-call officer. Fortunately, in Brasilia, the duty phone goes weeks without ringing. I had the phone less than an hour before it rang. A women flying to Miami the next day at 3:00 in the afternoon did not have her visa. Okay. No big deal. I told her to call the Embassy in the morning. Since she interviewed last week, it should be ready or could be made ready and if she called early enough, she would have plenty of time to come pick it up and still make her flight with plenty of time to spare.

A half hour later it rings again. 7:11 p.m. A plane has gone down 32 miles outside of Belem into the Amazon with 3 Americans aboard.

Seriously?

I was on the phone for the next two hours, relaying information, reconciling conflicting information...there were 7 on board...3 American and 3 Indians...no, there were 4 Indians...no 3 Indians...there was one plane...no, two planes, one landed successfully the other landed in a clearing in the jungle on the Ilha de Marajo, taking coordinates. I thought it was a test of my ability as the on-call. I thought it was a prank. At one point I was counseled, “Having to spend the night in the jungle is an acceptable inconvenience for flying a charter plane over the Amazon.” By 11:30, the phone had stopped ringing. (All were uninjured and in no immediate danger. The fire department picked up the downed passengers in a helicopter shortly after dawn.)

We parked at the hospital and checked into the pediatric ER. I sat down and gave the attendant Peter’s name. I spelled it for him. “É tudo?” (“That’s all?”) “Sim.” (“Yes.”)

The screen on his computer looked like this:

Joana Madalena Abreu Santos Almeida
Maria do Carmo Mão de Ferro e Cunha
Leonor Soares Henriques Pais de Graças
Bruna Fabiola de Cunha Oliveira e Costas
Peter Hanna

Eventually the attendant looked up at me, then looked at my shirt and asked, “Sangue?” (“Blood?”)

“Sim.”

“Dele?” (“His?”) pointing to Petey.

“Sim!”

His eyes widened like saucers.

Word to the wise, to fast-track your way through a Brazilian ER, show up bloody. Pete appeared to be the only person in the crowded ER in a state of genuine emergency. I don’t know how the Brazilian healthcare system works (admittedly, I don’t know how the American health care system works either), but it appeared as though everyone else in the emergency room was there for a routine check-up.

We waited outside Sala 7, a Brazilian soap opera on all of the ten or so flat screen TVs.

We didn’t wait long, and once the doctor—in high heels, like all the other female doctors—no orthopedic loafers or Crocs in Brazil, folks!—cleaned up Petey’s mouth, she discovered that the other tooth was still there, pushed up into his gum. The orderly had to bind Petey up like a burrito while she cleaned his mouth. He even used tape. But the doctor convinced us that he wasn’t in pain, and that the only pain he felt was just at the moment the accident at occurred. Both Elise and I had a hard time believing that. How did the doctor know? Pete fell asleep in Elise’s arms as she wrote down the name and number of a pediatric dentist.

We went to the dentist the next morning. Before putting Peter in the examination chair, she went through everything she was going to do to Peter with a stuffed lion, going so far as to put sunglasses on the stuffed lion and turning on the examination light. She lowered the lion’s chair, tilted him back and even put the tiny, extendable mirror in his mouth. Peter looked on tentatively, huddled in Elise’s arms. I had never experienced anyone treating Peter has such a...person...more than just a baby or toddler, but someone with real emotions, trepidations and anxieties before, even more so than I do myself, sometimes. It worked. Of course, Peter wasn’t not going to cry or be nervous, but I believe it went much better than it might have gone otherwise if she just threw him in the chair and had her way with him, jabbing long metal mirrors in his mouth. She said he was going to be fine. Something I think we had already concluded, but it was nice to hear it from an authority.

The one tooth couldn’t be put back in despite the marvels of modern medicine and the lengths to which I had gone to preserve the tooth (I still have it. It’s in the same Ziploc baggie in my breast pocket as I write this.), and the other would descend on its own. We aren’t completely out of the woods yet. We still have an x-ray to take which will undoubtedly entail more crying, more wrestling, but I think the worst is behind us. The space won’t fill in until he gets his adult tooth which may come earlier than normal since it won’t meet any resistance. And if he is ever feeling self-conscious he can get a prosthetic when he is a little older, but throughout he was quintessential Peter, easy to smile and tough as nails.

The tooth fairy came last night and left him one Brazilian real. Moreover, he gets to keep the tooth.