{the abscess}

I am fairly certain that the day will come, when our little Tanner will want to know the story of how exactly he lost his first tooth. Or it's quite possible that the trauma surrounding the whole event will forever stick with him, and he'll always remember the day he 'lost' his first tooth. Either way.....

a journaling post is in order!

Where to start. My heart breaks when I look at these pictures above. I felt so bad for Tanner during those 2 1/2 days that his abscess started. It started Sat. night at about 3am to be exact. He came into our room crying hysterically and saying that his tooth hurt. Before that, he had never and I mean never once complained that his 'brown' tooth had ever hurt him. Then Sunday morning came and he still said that it bothered him, but it wasn't quite as dramatic as the middle of the night pain he had experienced earlier. As the day progressed, his upper lip began to swell and he wouldn't eat anything because he said it hurt too bad. By Sunday evening the swelling was pretty significant and he was in a lot of pain. 

Monday morning was a big headache trying to get a hold of someone who could help us out. Long story short....the pediatric dentist who he had seen last June said that he thought it would be best to start him on a 7 day course of antibiotics to 'cool' the infection/abscessed tooth down before having it removed. So that was the plan, treat with antibiotics and reevaluate at the end of the week. Well it seemed like a reasonable plan--until Monday night we took a look into his mouth and saw this!! The picture on the left was taken at about 8:00pm that night. He had developed a hematoma under his gums. The abscess was starting to drain down into his gums which of course was very traumatic to him as well as pain inducing. By early the next morning (Tues) it looked like the picture on the right. The dentist was kind enough to give us his cell # when we spoke to him Monday morning to discuss the situation with him and start him on the antibiotics. Well, needless to say there was no possible way that Tanner was going to last another day with that abscessed tooth. And thankfully the dentist agreed and took him in Tuesday morning to get it removed.

I'd like to say that it was smooth sailing from the looks of the pic above, but that'd be a lie :) I don't really want to remember too much about what happened during that visit. It was traumatic, it was painful, there were a lot of tears and the 'gas' made Tanner all sorts of wacky. But in the end....the abscessed tooth was removed, and Tanner survived. So all in all it was a success.

So there you go Tanner boy! That is the story of how your brown tooth became no more!!