The Tooth

Here is my beautiful Holly girl. She is showing off her front tooth which has turned dark purple. About a month or so ago, she fell onto the stairs in the garage and knocked her front tooth quite forward. I wasn't home at the time but Jeremy said it looked pretty awful. It has since moved relatively back into place and we were just watching and waiting as we were instructed by a dentist. I was hoping that it would be alright since it had been such a long time, but a week or two ago it started to go dark. I took her to a pediatric dentist (Dr. Stevenson) Monday and after looking at the xrays he said it was infected and needed to be extracted. I was a little surprised about this because I had called another dentist office and they told me that we would probably just need to file it down a little and then they could put a crown on it to make it look nice again. When I mentioned this to Dr. Stevenson he said that if we didn't take it out it would continue to damage the bone, her gums and possibly her new permanent tooth as well. When I asked if he would replace it with a fake tooth, he said it would be strictly cosmetic and we could but he wouldn't recommend it. I came home from the dentist with a prescription for antibiotics to help slow the infection and an appointment to extract the tooth on April 22nd.

I immediately came home and called my mom and expressed my concerns about the differening opinions I had received. I really didn't want to pull out Holly's tooth if we didn't absolutely need to and I didn't know if Dr. Stevenson was being extreme or really knew what he was talking about. Anyway, as I was talking to my mom I was looking it up on the internet. What I found made me feel much better about what Dr. Stevenson had said. Everything I read said that most of the time a "bruised tooth" will lighten up on its own and will not be a problem, but sometimes it will get infected and then it can become absessed and do more damage. In those cases, it said that it was best to take out the tooth. So, I guess Holly is just one of those extreme cases. We also discovered on the internet that Dr. Stevenson practices at Primary Children's as well and that made me feel a lot better about his knowledge and ability.

Then this morning I got a message from Dr. Stevenson himself. He said that he didn't realize that he was so far out in scheduling and he really wanted to get Holly in sooner than that. He asked me to call him back on his cell phone. I called him back and he asked if we could do it Monday morning at 7:30. He said that he would come in early to get it done before his other appointments. I guess that he really is anxious to get it out. I don't know quite when and how to tell Holly that we have to go back to the dentist since she wasn't too thrilled about it the first time, but I'm grateful that I got her in when I did so we can stop the damage and that we seem to have found a good dentist for the future as well.