Baby number six is going down to Children's Hospital for dental surgery. He's only 17 months old, and the dentist has been watching his teeth carefully and caring for them since he was 11 months old. Every 6-8 weeks, we have gone back for more temporary fillings.
This is NOT baby bottle mouth. He won't take a bottle and hates to drink anything except water or breast milk.
This is a baby whose teeth formed poorly somehow, despite what everyone keeps telling me (oh, no--you just have strong bacteria in your mouth; oh, no--he just takes a bottle; oh, no--you just didn't brush his teeth). NO. This is not my fault.
Except it is--the bad genetics run in my family. My kids' teeth, my sister's teeth, my nieces and nephew's teeth, my cousin's teeth...all come in with spots of enamel missing, so they decay really fast. So it's my fault because Elijah got the genes from me. But beyond granting him life with my bad genetics, I did nothing wrong.
Here's the thing: With the dentist watching us carefully and seeing him often, and me being careful, we went 8 weeks ago and his molars hadn't erupted yet. All good, right? Well, we went in last week for our checkup and his molars had erupted and were already decayed!
You can talk about dental hygiene problems all you want, but you have to acknowledge that a baby's teeth, even under the worst circumstances, should last more than 8 weeks. Even if they're drinking soda every day, a baby's teeth should last longer than 8 weeks.
And today he woke up with an infected mouth--swollen lip and cheek--after crying for hours last night. Abscess? I think so. Or perhaps it has something to do with the fact that his front teeth, which have been slowly decaying, have turned black over the last 2 days since we saw the dentist. Yikes! Double Yikes!
Good thing they're planning to get his teeth fixed in the next two weeks, because there is no way he'd make it to adulthood without some help here.
Poor kid.
And it's all my fault. But it's not my fault.
No comments:
Post a Comment