Oh Henry!

This little guy fell and hit his mouth on our bamboo step. His hands were preoccupied with a sippy cup that slid over the step, leaving his mouth to take the blow. I scooped him up and waited for the blood to come. Surprisingly, it didn’t come as soon as I thought, nor with the amount I imagined in my head.

I laid him back on our bed when I saw a bit of blood in his mouth. I assumed it was his attacher-thing (he’s torn that before). I lifted his lip and to my horror, his tooth was gone! I ran back over to the step to see if it had been knocked out there, but I couldn’t find anything nor realized that he had hit the step so hard. I was right behind him and saw it all happen. I looked again and could see a bit of his tooth. The root?

I called Ryan, controlling tears and he called our pediatric dentist. She was out having just had surgery, and the other dentist was out of town. They gave us a referral to another pediatric dentist. I thought about calling our dentist but I knew he was with his family in Disneyland. (How dare all these dentist leave at the same time.)

I went ahead and made the call to California and our dentist said to make an appointment with that ped dentist. It wasn’t necessarily and emergency situation, but if they had to extract any part of the tooth, they’d want to do it before it abscessed. Barf. I asked about the possibility that it was shoved back up into his gums, but was told that that was pretty rare and again, I didn’t think he’d hit that hard. And, he hadn’t cut his mouth at all, either. Weird.

Here he is getting an x-ray (which we had to do twice since after the first one, they’d lost it by the time we got back to the exam chair).

Henry was a champ and let the dentist check everything out in his mouth. Again, I asked if the tooth had gone back up. ‘Unlikely’ was the response.

Well as it turned out, Henry does still have his tooth. He hit it just right to knock it back up- and without hitting any other teeth. I’m pretty relieved he still has it and all we can do now is wait for it to come back down. We won’t know if it did any damage to adult teeth until they come in. So, we have a good 7-8 years to see. I’m good with that.

Right after his appointment we hit Cold Stone. It was right there.

He didn’t start swelling until he woke up the next day. It wasn’t too bad either, but so sad to see his face puffy for a couple of days. (Up his left side, up to his eye.)

His missing tooth – 2nd on the left.

Hopefully we won’t see this happen again - this kid is everywhere and falling all the time. But, he's still the happiest 19 month old around.

Oh Henry!