snaggletooth

Julianna's tooth finally came out yesterday.  On the playground.  She never found it.

After the visit to the dentist last week they sent us to the pediatrician and we left with no more answers than we came with.  The dentist had said we should possibly see a periodontist and an endocrinologist, but the ped said there was no need to see an endocrinologist because all of her bloodwork from the time she lost a tooth at 3 years old came back normal.  I called a couple of periodontists who basically didn't want to see her because she is a child and children "don't typically have gum disease."

So I went home and I did more googling for premature tooth loss.  Yeah.  Big mistake.

We decided to go to a different dentist this morning to get a second opinion.  It was not a pediatric dentist, but I really felt like she took the time to hear me and give her honest opinion.

She took bite wing x-rays and some other kind of top and bottom x-rays (6 x-rays total) and talked with me at length about what has been going on with Jules' teeth.


She asked a lot of questions about what the pediatric dentist had done last week before the tooth actually came out, etc. She looked at the x-rays with me and compared them with her own son's x-rays when he was 4 years old. Basically, she just said that she thinks Julianna is going to get her permanent teeth early. You could see on the x-rays where they were really close to coming through. Even Jules has 6 year molars that looked like they were close to the top of the gum. She asked Julianna a lot of questions about the pain she had complained about and she seemed to think that he answers were normal.

She said the only thing that she thought about it all that might be of conern was that the two teeth in particular that she lost were not typically the teeth that come out first and she wasn't sure why they did in this case. But from the x-ray it looks as if it was the permanent teeth that made them loose.

The dentist said she would like to check with her friend who was a periodontist and just ask him about it and she'd let us know what she found out in the next day or two, but she didn't expect it to be anything of concern. She said she didn't need to see the bloodwork from the pediatrician for hypophosphatasia since the pediatrician said her levels were within normal range.

One last thing she did say that we should watch for are slight speech developmental issues that might arise due to Julianna having no teeth down there and then bigger permanent teeth so early.

I'll take it.