7 LESSONS OF LIFE FROM MY SON’S VISIT TO THE DENTIST by Isaac Oluyi

In my almost 4 decades on the surface of the earth, I have never visited a dentist! I am sure most of you may be surprised. My path and that of a dentist have never crossed. As a child I had a lot of issues with my teeth stemming from eating of sweet things. It was an excruciatingly painful experience, yet I did not have the luxury of being attended to by a dentist. It was not because I did not want to see a dentist, but for paucity of financial resources. My barely educated, but resourceful late mother (the one I fondly call my ‘rich teacher’) came up with options so that I would not lose any of my teeth. She gave me ‘orin ata’ (literally translated as pepper chewing stick) each time I complained of toothache. And it worked like talisman of India, as I never lost any of my teeth.  As effective as ‘orin ata’ was for my case, can I offer the same to my children in this 21^st Century, when we are more westernised than the westerners themselves? The answer is obviously ‘no’!

That what worked for me is no longer fashionable now played out when my first son complained of toothache. I could not give him orin ata as he would have bombarded me with litany of questions. So, I opted for the option of a dentist since I can afford it. Hence, my first visit to the dentist. At least, when you are in Rome you behave like the Romans. The kernel of this piece is not the visit, but the lessons of life I learnt from the experience.

While the diagnosis was going on I discovered that my son had been nursing this pain for over two years! Being a boarding student, he narrated to the dentist that he had experienced serious toothache in school on several occasions. That once he took paracetamol the pain would go.  So, he did not deem it a serious issue and thus he concealed it from us. The bubble however burst when he came home in August 2014. The pain resurfaced. This time, it came with a full force that the usual antidote – paracetamol became inefficacious! The harder he tried not to let us know what he was going through, the more difficult it was for him as the ache refused to go away. And so the cat was let out of the bag! I took him to the dentist and more efficacious drug was given to him. This suppressed the pain immediately. But because much damage has been done to the teeth we had to go back again after 72 hours. This time, we spent and spent a lot of money. From x-ray (radiography) to scaling and polishing to other dental jargons I have no understanding of. It was a traumatic experience for me because I had to stay there for a whole day, with other appointments fixed. The dentists warned my son to desist from the habit of eating sweet things as this is capable of making him lose all his teeth before his 24^th birthday! Although I found the experience unsavoury, I took away several valuable lessons of life.

1.      Change is the only constant thing in life. If you are not ready to change, the dynamics of life will force you to change. If I had insisted on orin ata, other damaging effects discovered would not have been noticed.

2.      What you take for granted today may turn out to be a serious pain in your neck tomorrow. No matter how long it takes, a concealed problem will always resurface except a lasting solution is proffered to it.

3.      A temporary solution will remain what it is – temporary. Locate the root cause of the problem and deal with it. My son’s continued use of paracetamol only proved to be a tentative measure!

4.      What is left unattended to today will take a lot of time from you tomorrow. Time is of essence; it is better to do the right thing at the right time. If my son had not concealed the problem when it was still manageable, perhaps we could have nipped it in the bud and the time wasted at the dental clinic could have been used for more precious things.

5.      The money spent could also have been used for more important things that will benefit humanity, if he had been taking care of his teeth very well.

6.      It is not sufficient to spend time with your children; it is infinitely more important to spend QUALITY time with them. If I had been arranging my leave to coincide with their long vacations like I did this year I would have discovered long before now.

7.      What is sweet can kill. Do not take it because it is sweet; take it because it is nutritious and beneficial to your body.

I can list several other lessons from this experience, but I have to stop here for my readers to glean other inherent lessons from this piece. It is better to learn from other people’s experiences than to learn from yours. Unfortunately, I have to learn from mine. Please learn from my son’s experience, as experience is the best teacher.