Ouch! Miss A Has Another Accident

When I was pregnant with Miss A, a male co-worker told me how his only goal when his daughter was born a year or so prior was to keep her alive. I laughed and commented that I hoped to aim a little bit higher than just "alive".

Now I'm beginning to understand the wisdom of his words.

Miss A is just shy of 26 months, and already she has had a broken wrist and now has had to have one of her top front teeth pulled. If she continues to have injuries at this pace, we are in for a heck of a time!

This latest mishap occurred last Wednesday afternoon, at day care. Apparently, she was running around and collided with another little kiddo. In the process of trying to recover from that, she tripped, fell, and slammed (and I do mean slammed) into one of the little tables they sit at to eat.

I arrived to pick her up just a couple minutes after it occurred. There is nothing that prepares you for having your child open his or her mouth and seeing blood-covered teeth pointing in directions that teeth should not be pointing in.

She must have hit the edge of the table at an angle, because one of her top front teeth remained all the way down, but the bottom of it was pushed back toward the back of her mouth to the degree that it popped out of its socket and could not be re-positioned and salvaged. The dentist said it risked becoming infected within a couple of days and that an infection would damage the adult teeth that are just starting to solidify from a gelatinous texture right above it, so we agreed that the best course of action was to remove it.

The tooth to the outside of that one seems to have been shoved back up into the gums a little bit. He said the nerve may die and the tooth may discolor, but he thinks she'll be able to keep it. The other front tooth should also survive the incident, but it will take a while to look normal again - it was pushed a fair ways up into the gums, and the bottom of it is pointing out a bit now, so that tooth seemed to move in the opposite direction of the other one.

Miss A's poor little face is also horribly bruised, mostly on the right side. (It was the right front tooth that had to come out.) She has a dark blue/gray line of bruising that runs literally from the corner of her eye where it meets her nose, down to the corner of her mouth. Then there's more bruising to the side of her mouth and on her chin. She's very fair-skinned, so the bruises show up even more than they would on someone with less pale skin. She literally looks like she's been beaten up. When we go out in public, I feel like having her wear a sign that says "My parents don't beat me, really they don't..."

The bruising was more than the dentist expected, so he had us take her to the pediatrician to confirm that she did not have any facial fractures. Thankfully, she didn't.

I have to hand it to Miss A, though - she is quite the trooper. She had a couple doses of Advil the night it happened and the next day, but other than that, she has not asked for any pain meds. She's had to adjust the way she eats and drinks, but she's figured out how to put food on her molars in the back of her mouth so that she can still chew them up. Fortunately we had started to transition her to drinking out of an open cup without a lid about a month before this happened. She is able to do that quite well with very little spilling, which is helpful since sucking on a straw is probably going to continue being too painful for at least another week or two.

In a few weeks, we'll go back to the dentist so that she can get an impression made for a cosmetic fix. I don't know exactly what it involves yet or how it works, but we'll find out more details then. The dentist said it would be okay to leave the gap where that tooth was until her adult tooth comes in 5-6 years from now, but I don't want to do that to her. Right now her 2-year-old friends don't know enough to tease her about it, but I could see that changing as she gets a little bit older.

Boys are supposed to be even more rambunctious than girls, so if this is what things are like with Miss A, I can't imagine what sorts of calamities we may have to deal with from Kiddo #2!

Speaking of, we had our most recent checkup today. I'm 27w3d, and Kiddo's estimated weight is 2.5 pounds. So trucking right along. Twice-a-week biophysical profiles/non-stress tests start at 32 weeks, and then things should move quickly from there.

We're in the neighborhood of about 10-11 weeks away from delivery if all goes smoothly. It still seems very far away, but I have a feeling it may pass quickly. Hard to believe!