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In my last postal titled “A Dental Nightmare” I started off by saying that I’ve felt a little bummed this past week. I was going to write about the whole week of concerns until I finished writing about the trip to the dentist that started the week off for us. I noticed that the post was getting a bit long and for fear that people wouldn’t read it if it got any longer, I decided to continue with this second post today.

So here we are. If you read my blog regularly, you know that Matthew has just got well after having a pretty serious repertory infection that required albuterol breathing treatments. I may have never mentioned this, but at one of Matthew’s earliest checkups revealed that he had a slight heart murmur that has always been in the back of my mind from that point up through today. So Matthew just started feeling well again and now he has four cavities that we need to address. Not only does Matthew have four cavities that are just beginning to give him a little pain, but he has also not been dealing too well with the idea of having another baby in the house. Matthew has always been really close to Stephanie and just the thought that McKenna will take away mommy’s attention has created a little regression in him.

Each week at Church, he’s been crying that he doesn’t want to go to Sunday School. Just last week, he cried all day at school and told his teachings his belly hurt. The school called Stephanie and asked her to come pick him up. Once there, he perked right up and you would have thought this little guy was well enough to compete in the Olympics with all the gymnastics he was doing when he got so excited about his mommy coming to pick him up. So Stephanie and I are dealing with Matthew who has four cavities and some very late in the game separation anxiety.

If it were only these two things, I don’t feel that I would be as stressed out as I am. However, Meagan is also having some medical issues of her own. Starting months ago, she began to complain that her neck hurts and her fingers hurt. These complaints happened mainly at night. It was not until recently that I noticed that when she complained of her neck hurting, she kept tilting her head back and forth. Just about three weeks ago, she was giving me a hug and as she turned her head sideways, I heard her neck pop, and after our hug, when she turned her head back, it popped again. In fact, it pops all day long whenever she moves it from side to side. We are not talking straining movement, we are talking normal head movement. We asked the doctor about this and he said he couldn’t feel anything wrong, but he gave us an order for an x-ray for her neck.

We haven’t taking Meagan for her x-ray yet because I began to notice something else. When we go shopping and are walking for a long period of time, I noticed that Meagan would stop and roll her foot around on the with her foot arched and with the tip of her shoe (her toes) pointing straight down to the ground. I figured her toes or foot must be itching. Then I thought perhaps her shoes were getting too small. When Stephanie got her a new pair of shoes, she continued to do the same thing. The other day, I asked Meagan to take her shoe of when she was doing this and I asked her if her foot itched. She said no, it hurt. She said… “I have to roll my foot to make it stop hurting.” I asked her to point to where it was hurting. She pointed to her ankle. I held her precious ankle in my hand and I asked her to roll her foot like she is used to doing. While she rolled her foot, her ankle cracked and popped just like her neck does when she turns her head. So yes, I’m going to take some time to get my kids both looked at. Matthew by a new dentist, Meagan by her pediatrician and a bone specialist.

If that weren’t enough, I have a pregnant wife who is due in four to five weeks. She’s got hypertension with this pregnancy. They just told her that she has had protein in her urine the last two weeks and they are monitoring her at the hospital and in her doctor’s office twice a week. Setting all the financial implications of all this aside.. If it where only for the finances, I would be okay.. But financial implications aside, I can’t stand it to know that my family is having so much going on medically.

I’m not what you would call depressed about this… But it is all coming together and causing a great deal of stress and anxiety. I just want my family to be well and I would like to know that I can do whatever it takes to get them the care that they need.

Please be in prayer for Matthew, Meagan, McKenna, and Stephanie. Oh, and me too.

I’ve been feeling a little down over this past week. Early last week, we took both Meagan and Matthew to the dentist for a cleaning. Because Meagan just had well over $10,000 in surgery done on her teeth just back in December and because Matthew is only three years old, we though they would take them back and do a simple cleaning. However, this dentist’s office insisted that they both have xrays and took them back. Stephanie is pregnant of course and was not allowed to go back with them for the xrays.

Meagan already has a history with this office… Let me explain… The last time Meagan went to the dentist’s office she had to be restrained with straps on her arms and legs when it came time to do her xrays. I think that this was the lack of the staff’s ability to handle the fears of children moreso than with Meagan’s attitude. After that visit last year, they said Meagan had four cavities in her teeth that needed to be filled. However, because of her reaction back in the xray room, they didn’t feel she would do well to have the work done in the office, so they said that she must be seen at St Luke Hospital. The waiting list for a procedure such as this is MONTHS LONG and by the time December came around, Meagan was experiencing MAJOR pain in her mouth and it turned out that the decay had spread to the point where several nerves had to be removed and she has, lets just say a lot more than four, teeth capped. $10,000 dollars later, here we are back in the office and they say that my children need xrays again.

Meagan didn’t require the use of restraints this time, however, she still had a pretty traumatic experience with this staff again. I should have known better than to not take some time off of work to go along with Stephanie and the kids. Had I gone, I would have been able to see the attitudes that I only heard about later from my wife and we could have left that office before they even had their x-rays done.

Meagan’s x-rays looked perfectly fine.. I could have told them that…. She just had several HOURS of surgery on her teeth just four months ago! And the goofy dentist we had hardly could have missed a tooth, he capped nearly every single baby tooth my daughter has except for her front teeth on the top and bottom.

Now Matthew went back, and if you know Matthew, you know he’s a pretty laid back kind of guy. Stephanie said even though he had to go back by himself into the x-ray room, he did an amazing job. He just sat there as still as any adult would have and did exactly what he was told to do. The only tears from him came was when he was doing his cleaning. However, it was not anything out of the ordinary for a three year old boy with so much stuff going on inside his mouth for the very first time.

The dentist got the x-rays and told my wife that my little guy has four small cavities that need to be filled. HOWEVER!!!!! Rather than filling them right there in his office or even scheduling something for the next week, he once again suggested major surgery at St Luke Hospital. Gee, I wonder if Stephanie and I have learned our lesson!!! What would Matthew’s teeth look like if we waited for two months for an approval from our health insurance company and then waiting until December of this year when the first appointment at the hospital became available. I think NOT!!!

So I sent out an email to everyone within my email address book who has children around my kids age. I explained a little bit of what was going on and everyone emailed back and said the same thing… You need a second opinion…. Not a single one of them had ever heard of a child going to the hospital for routine fillings. That is what Meagan would have needed had her teeth been treated when we first took her for her first checkup. After a week of responses from about 40 couples….. Stephanie and I are armed with example after example where children ages 3 and up have had dental work done in the dentist’s office. I’ve narrowed down the new dentist that we are going to go to to a Dr. Haas and a group called Cincinnati Dental. My wife and I are going to likely set something up for this week some time.

I thank all of those who took the time to email me their stories and who had given me referrals to good pediatric dentists. I especially am thankful for all the prayers that I had received. Please continue to pray as I make my next post about other medical concerns.

Good morning. It’s Thursday March 10, 2005 and its been a while since I’ve given an update on my life. There’s been a lot of things going on lately, mostly good with some obvious hurdles to overcome. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to type as I think…

My Wife:

Wow! What can I say about my wife? She is sooooooooooo Amazing! Stephanie and I went to the Family Life Marriage Conference, “A Weekend To Remember” for the second year in a row. The material was exactly the same but we pulled so much more out of it this time around. Our relationship changed for the better after last year’s conference… You can read my reaction from it by reading the blog I posted last year… Read the rest of this entry »