Oliver's Last Appointment.

A lot of people have been thinking about my baby over the last few weeks. The Tongue Tie Era has been pretty terrible.

But now, we're done.

We (Oliver, Mom, Josh, and I) went to a follow-up with Dr. M a couple of weeks after the surgery. She told us that the tissue was reattaching, and we had a small window to fix it. She was also unkind, cruel, condescending, and borderline hateful. We were all stunned. But I did as she said, and I often saw blood, which is supposed to indicate that the reconnecting fibers are breaking. It was horrible.

Last week, we saw Cynthia, and she said that the wound had healed. She said she could see where it had started to reattach, but it wasn't reattached anymore. I'd done something right--I had broken the reattachment! So Cynthia showed us how to do scar massages. I asked if we would do them every three hours, and she said that every six hours, four times a day, was enough. Wow! Oliver eventually realized that I was doing something different and significantly less painful, and he cooperated more. I stopped pulling him out of class, and I only woke him once in the night.

But Oliver and I had an appointment this week. Just him and me. With Dr. M.

I made up my mind to be friendly. I told her about Cynthia and the scar massages. Dr. M told me that she saw significant but incomplete reattachment. But she was calling Oliver sweetheart in a non-condescending way, and she was gentle even as she pried his strong jaws open. She got points for that.

"I'm hearing that you don't want to do the stretches anymore, that you just want to do the scar massage." My automatic response was to agree with whatever she wanted me to do. But I didn't. I saw, "Yes."

She didn't really challenge me. So even if I didn't feel so confident, I must have appeared so. She did some minor origami (for the third or fourth time since I met her) so show how the wound looked after the surgery and how it looked now. I nodded politely, thinking If you show me that paper thing one more time, I'm going to lose my mind.

So she said our next appointment would be...

In six months with our "dental home."  She shook my hand and thanked me for my patience.

So no more procedures at school, in the car, or in the middle of the night. I'm going to do the scar massages when it makes sense for my family. And we don't have to see that doctor anymore.

And right before and right after all this, Oliver was smiling and skipping around. He doesn't let anything steal his joy for long.