The pain of managing a loved one’s pain

It’s gone and happened. It couldn’t be all sunsets and bird watching.

I shared that Husband and I have run away to a house on a remote part of the coast.

We’ve now had our first remote medical emergency.

It happened last week as I left Husband unsupervised.

You could legitimately mark that down as “Mistake No. 1.”

I went back to the big city house, doing some business stuff, seeing our daughters, and doing girl stuff like that hair appointment I wrote about last week freeing my curly hair.

Meanwhile, Husband headed to the one dive joint in this small town and ordered some fried oysters. Sounds innocent enough, but history will show this as, “Mistake No. 2.”

He bit down on a runaway pearl and cracked his tooth in half.

“I can keep it intact by pushing my tongue up against my cheek,” he said hoping I wouldn’t worry. Neither worked.

So, the next day he went in search of a rent-a-dentist.

On a Saturday.

In a small town.

What could go wrong?

Oh, this turned out to be so much worse than your worst thought.

As the dentist struggled to pull the tooth, his drill or machete slipped, pulverizing the inside Husband’s cheek and drilling into the previously healthy tooth in front of it.

“Mistake No. 3?”

Sounds like the understatement of the century, especially as I watched Husband in immense pain all week.

“I think I feel the piece of tooth he couldn’t get out,” he shared.

Somehow, Husband thought it was a good idea to go back to this same guy for a check-up the following Saturday.

Mistake No. 4.

This time I came along, only to find out no one could come in with him.

“What took so long?” I asked as Husband came out cheek now twice as swollen.

“He did another procedure,” he mumbled.

“He what?” I was horrified and losing count of the mistakes.

“Apparently, that wasn’t the rest of my busted tooth I was feeling. It was my exposed jawbone.”

Why do I share this horror movie moment?

Well, because sharing is what we do here.

And you, too, might be trying to manage someone else’s pain.

Dear Reader, I’m finding it physically hurts to watch someone you love in pain.

One the bright side, Husband has not offered a single comment about the new curly hairstyle.

I am pretty sure he doesn’t like it. He might even call it

“my mistake,” but he’s in too much pain from the tooth debacle to say anything, no matter how much it hurts him to look at it.

I’m taking matters into my own hands.

I will be on the phone first thing in the morning to get him into see a proper oral surgeon.

And as the most desperate of measures, I’m whipping out my blow dryer. Think of it as “Comfort Wife Hair.”

Once this mouth emergency is over, and the humidity descends, I will pop those curls back out.

Make no mistake about that.