Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Dental work

Last night I learned another lesson in trusting God. Yesterday Daniel went to a new dentist. Daniel's family has a genetic variation which makes it difficult to process anesthetics. That makes visiting the dentist, after six years of not going, very interesting. They wanted to numb him, and seemed to know about the variation, and what to use instead, even going so far as to grab their local anesthetic go-to book, and show Daniel the list of safe drugs that they use.

They ended up giving him Septocaine, which is on the list of safe drugs. However, when we got home, after spending the afternoon at the in-law's house, because Daniel was too numb to drive home, I googled Septocaine (brand name) and articaine (drug name) and discovered that articaine actually has an additional ester group added to it, and it's the esters that Daniel can't process!

The dentist did tell the first hygienist to make a note in his chart to only give him half the dose of Septocaine, but the hygienist who actually did his cleaning was a different one, and Daniel isn't sure if she gave him half a dose, or the whole dose. We'll definitely need to check on that before his next appointment in December.

Do you like going to the dentist?

2 comments:

  1. Goodness! Hope he is ok! I do not like the dentist, and what are the chances, went today!! Thankfully just a cleaning, but still never fun!

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    Replies
    1. Yes, thankfully he is okay now! It just took him a lot longer than normal to recover from the anesthetic.

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