So I may have given away a little of the plot there. And maybe you don’t have a daughter. Or hair. Or if you had a daughter, you would never give her Norco. Nor, if you had hair, would you ever color it. But you shouldn’t stop reading. Because you never know.
Yesterday my daughter had impacted wisdom teeth removed. Never a good candidate for the dentist’s chair, and very squirrely around general anesthesia, this was not a happy event for her. She came home and her face swelled up like a balloon. Despite tons of ice and ibuprofen, there was quickly bruising, sinus pain, jaw pain, and pain in her throat and straight up to her temples. I dosed her and iced her and got her smoothies and soups and special drinks. I finished my work day charting on the couch, and getting up every five minutes to fetch her something from the fridge. Things were jogging along okay and I felt like a reasonably good mom. A mom who is also happily a nurse. A nurse who is a mom. It was all fairly good.
This morning, the swelling was worse. She iced and dosed and iced, and we lay around with me making fun of her for looking like a chipmunk. We watched the videos she had inadvertently made of herself while emerging from anesthesia. She didn’t remember taking them. They were really funny. And we laughed about how she had called a store during the same time, with her mouth stuffed full of cotton, and tried to speak with the saleslady, who just kept saying honey, I can’t understand a single thing you are saying.
But around 10am the pain spiked. She was miserable, and I decided she should take the Norco that was prescribed to her, as the ibuprofen just wasn’t cutting it. She’d had a Norco right after the surgery and had been okay. She took the Norco and got in the shower. Then I took my shower, and I began to apply the strange-smelling burgundy goop that is my do-it-yourself hair color. You wear plastic gloves and old clothes and it’s messy as hell. You’re supposed to carry out this complicated ritual with cotton balls and face cream to prevent your forehead and ears from being colored the same color as your hair. Because apparently that looks sort of weird.
I had just applied some, not even all, of the goop and had not yet started with the cotton balls and face cream when my daughter called out that she was feeling dizzy and nauseous and “really weird.” I immediately did nothing. She often feels really weird. But shortly thereafter, she called out that she was feeling really really weird. I quickly realized that to be coloring my hair at this moment was in fact a bad idea. I slapped on the rest of the goop and a plastic shower cap and a towel and went in to minister to her.
This was the start of an hour of seriously bad reaction to narcotics. I did everything I could, but nothing made her feel better. Her dad called in a prescription for Zofran and dashed to CVS to pick it up. I gave her ginger fizz and tried to talk her through the nausea. I googled natural nausea remedies in case we happened by some fluke to have them growing in our garden.
Meanwhile, under the towel and the shower cap, my hair was turning purple.
A friend arrived and comforted her. Her dad delivered the Zofran, and she got quick relief. It all started to resolve. I stopped feeling like the worst of moms for giving her the Norco. How could I have known?
Meanwhile, my hair, my forehead, and my ears were all purple. The goop was supposed to color my hair a chic reddish brown, but it had been in my hair for a lot longer than such goop is supposed to be and there had been no face-cream-lathered cotton balls to prevent my skin from being purpled also.
The good news was I knew my daughter was feeling better because she started to laugh at me. Our friend laughed at me too. I went into the bathroom to shower the goop off and see the extent of the damage.
My skin reverted to a normal color after lots of showering, but my hair, it’s pretty purple. And not just uniformally either. I slapped the color on so rapidly that it’s sort of uneven. So some of my hair is really purple, and some of it just a bit, and some is sort of its own natural color shining cheerily through. With a bit of grey, just for good measure.
This all points to the fact that if you have a daughter, and she gets her wisdom teeth out, and she’s in a lot of pain, and you decide to give her one of her prescribed Norco, do not attempt to start coloring your hair. And if you do, don’t come crying to me.
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