Her Middle Name is Grace Yet She is Not So Graceful

Juliana bounces between being a girly girl and a wild, running child. She wears a dress or skirt almost everyday (she only has a few pair of pants and shorts). Although she would prefer to wear fancy shoes or flip flops along with those dresses, we insist that she wear tennis shoes because she is always in motion.

The child who is constantly in motion often runs into walls and trips and falls. She also manages to fall out of chairs at the dinner table and fall down for no apparent reason. We are used to hearing her fall followed by “I’m alright!”

Monday afternoon she was running outside at her summer program kicking the soccer ball with friends. Her feet got twisted up with another little girl and Juliana fell, hard. Her knee was scraped, but her mouth took the most impact.

One of her top, permanent teeth was loosed and and there was lots of blood. Of course it was late afternoon when this happened so by the time I talked to her dentist we weren’t able to get an appointment until 2:00 yesterday. In the meantime, we kept children’s Motrin and ice and soft food in regular rotation.

Throughout the morning on Tuesday Juliana kept saying that she wished it was 2:00 so Dr. Matt could fix her tooth. My kids love their pediatric dentist, in fact the boys cried when they found out that Juliana was going without them. It makes it easier to take her to an appointment that I knew would be painful when she feels comfortable there.

We walked into the room and as soon as Dr. Matt looked in his mouth, his expression changed. He sent Juliana out to get an x-ray and explained the situation to me. Her tooth was pulled down and pushed forward so they would need to: numb the area, clean all of the teeth on the top, apply temporary braces to 6 teeth to stabilize the injured tooth, position the tooth back into the correct place, and secure that tooth to the wire.

I won’t go into anymore details on the process – it was unpleasant and Juliana did awesome given the circumstances!

The good news is that the x-ray showed that her tooth is still immature – that means that the roots have not grown together at the top. Immature teeth heal faster because there is plenty of room for blood to circulate around the roots. So there is a good chance that her tooth will be OK.

We go back in two weeks to remove the brace and then she will return for regular x-rays every other month to check progress. In the meantime she thinks the brace is cool and was very excited to show off her teeth to her friends when I dropped her off this morning. I hope she continues to be happy, because she will be getting real braces in the very near future.

Side Note: Juliana must be hitting a growth spurt because she wants to eat twice as much food as usual…difficult under a restricted diet.