The other day, I texted a friend, “Today my assistant put a kid in a headlock while his grandmother straddled him so that I could remove his tooth. Horrible experience!”

She responded, “Headlock and straddling? Taken out of context, I’m pretty sure I could have you all arrested.”

Lawyer friends are the best!

Alas, not all children are well-behaved. Not all adults are well-behaved either. (Stupid sin nature!) It is not textbook dentistry to manually restrain children. I hate doing it. I didn’t want to do it. The grandmother pleaded with me to finish her grandson’s treatment. She lay on top of him, restrained his arms with one arm, and plugged his nose with her other hand on her own volition. When it takes 2 seconds to remove a necrotic baby tooth, maybe it’s better to get it done WWE-style, than to be put on a long wait list for general anesthesia, (financed by our taxes?) And, hopefully the Spiderman sticker we gave him helped him forget the trauma.

Sometimes we have to hurt a little in order to heal. I always feel miserable when I have to give someone an injection. There’s a part of me that wishes I could find joy in ALL tasks of my job at ALL times. My generation is supposed to love what we do. Or something. Work to live, not live to work? That’s totally not in the Bible. Anyway, I’ve quickly resolved that if I were to ever turn into someone who actually enjoyed inflicting pain on others, even for the ultimate end of helping/restoring/healing, then it might be time for a career shift.