ReNe: quebec city road trip (2/2)

Quebec City Road Trip, 5-11 Feb 2011

Besides the carnival, we also went around Quebec City. We didn't do much, just drove around and admired the snowiness of everything.

Ryan in a park. Actually he wasn't too happy to be trudging through the deep snow and couldn't wait to get back to the car.

Day 7 (11 Feb, Friday)

Fun at the biosphere. Originally built for Expo 67, Environment Canada bought the site in 1990 to turn it into an interactive museum showcasing and exploring the water ecosystems of the Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence River regions.

The geodesic dome, by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Originally an enclosed structure, a fire in 1976 bruned away the building's transparent acrylic bubble but the steel truss structure remained.

View from Mont Royal. The Biodome and 1976 Olympic Stadium is in the distance.

On the way back, we stopped at Montreal for the night and disaster struck. Ryan slipped in the bathtub and shattered his front upper left tooth. Initially we thought a fragment chipped off but by the next morning, we noted with dismay that the tooth had turned greyish and moved down and back. It was a tough decision -- to hurry back to Toronto as planned or to seek immediate dental attention in Montreal. We called our insurance and weighed the likelihood of getting an appointment with a pediatric dentist on Friday afternoon, and decided to look for a dentist in Montreal instead. Turned out that the earliest appointment we could get with a dentist nearby was 2 in the afternoon, an inconvenient time as it meant it would be too late to drive back to Toronto after that, so we got a room at Delta (besides the fact that the room we were staying in really, really sucked, we simply couldn't stay in that room where the accident occurred).

To cut a very long, agonizing story short, the dentist in Montreal basically said she couldn't do anything and that we would have to see a pediatric dentist when we get back to Toronto. In the meantime she prescribed antibiotics for possible infection. When we got back to Toronto the next day, the tooth was getting worse so we went to an emergency dentist, who took an X-ray and then yanked out the loose fragment, which he said was irritating the gum further. On Monday we went to a pediatric dentist and he took another X-ray and said he couldn't do anything as Ryan was too young, and referred us to Sick Children Hospital. We were astonished and aggrieved at that, as he was supposed to be the pediatric specialist; who better to deal with young kids? On Tuesday we went to Sick Children and they pulled out the tooth under local anesthesia; basically in a similar process to any adult extraction except that I had to help hold him down. No specialized equipment was used; I think all the previous dentists just didn't want the possible liability. It turned out that the tooth had shattered all the way to the root. One large fragment fell out in the bath and the other large fragment was hanging by a thread and yanked out by the emergency dentist. However, there were still small fragments and the root embedded in the gum, and those had to be extracted, a messy procedure.

[Post-op: His gum healed quite quickly after that; kids tend to heal much faster than adults. Within a day the bleeding stopped, and within a few days he could eat normally. In two weeks the gum had almost completely healed over. He noticed his lack of tooth for a while and kept counting his and our teeth, but after a while, got used to it.]