I’m not a dentist — or a medical professional of any kind, actually.
I’m just a mom, a mom who isn’t quite sure she’ll ever get the dreadfully painful sound of teeth hitting cement out of her head for as long as she lives.
The second it happened, I knew. My husband ran to console my toddler; I grabbed ice and a towel. Not knowing the extent of the damage, I said, “That was her teeth,” to which my husband replied, “I think they’re okay,” as he tried to examine the damage through the blood and cries.
But this mama knew.
Although I don’t think I’ll ever feel free of that traumatic experience, I do realize how fortunate we were in the grand scheme of things. With that being said, here are some things I learned or realized after our family’s experience with tooth trauma.
Your reaction matters.
Once we calmed my daughter down, she was back to her smiling self. The only thing, though, was her smile had been altered from the tumble. She was happily playing in the bath when I noticed the difference, and I broke into tears. “My poor baby,” I thought.
Suddenly, she, once again, became hysterical. Although she began to feel better (because kids are crazy resilient), the uncertainty of my facial expression and emotions confused and scared her. Had she done something wrong? Was she actually alright? Should she still be upset? I quickly realized my reaction held a lot of weight in the situation; I needed to hold it together for a moment for my daughter’s sake.
Mouths bleed—a lot.
You’ve probably heard this before. I know I had heard it from my older sister, an experienced mother of four, countless times before the noteworthy tumble. In the moment, though, I needed to remember and recite it. The amount of blood certainly increased my anxiety and shock around the entire situation, and while my daughter was injured, the situation could have been a lot worse.
Call your (or a) pediatric dentist.
My first instinct was to call an emergency dentist since it was around 6 PM on a Friday night — doesn’t it always seem to work out that way? Anyway, after several attempts, I understood that some emergency dentists won’t take a pediatric patient. Then, my logical brain kicked in, and I called our usual pediatric dentist.
While I’m not sure if this is standard practice, it certainly is worth a shot to call your pediatric dentist because ours had an emergency extension. Our dentist was able to call us back, talk through what happened and the outcome, look at some pictures we sent her, and reassure and instruct us on how to proceed through the weekend. I’ll be forever grateful for her in that moment because, in all the chaos, she was our sense of calm!
Hearing “at least they’re only baby teeth” isn’t helpful.
Even months later, I have to bite my tongue (pun slightly intended) when someone says, “At least they are only baby teeth.” While this might seem like a comforting statement to say in response to hearing our experience, it seems to undermine the feelings — of both myself and my daughter — about what happened.
Two things can most certainly be true: we can be happy the end result was not worse while also being upset anything ever happened. It was scary; it was traumatic. For a moment, I wasn’t sure of my daughter’s amount of pain. For days, I looked at my daughter, whose face had a noticeable injury, with caution and aid. For months, as I stated earlier, I would hear that horrendous sound ringing in my head.
So, yeah, they are only baby teeth, but she is also my beloved baby.
(Baby teeth are important. Read more about how to take better care of them here!)
It happens.
Lastly, but most importantly, these things happen. After kicking myself for days about what had happened, our pediatric dentist gave me a statistic about how often tooth trauma incidents occur in youth populations. I cannot quote her exactly, but it was quite a large number of children will have some kind of injury to their mouth at some point in their lifetime. After speaking with some other members of our family, I realized that we certainly meet or even exceed that research.
Now, I can tell myself time and time again that I could have prevented it from ever happening; however, who knows if that is even true. It was the perfect recipe for disaster: The distance she tripped — had she only been an inch or two further back. Her beloved pacifier — slipped out just before she fell. Where she fell — we had been playing sidewalk chalk near our front stoop.
All in all, things are going to happen whether we are prepared or not. Even to this day, I feel like I’m constantly playing defense to protect my daughter from accidents in all surroundings, but what will be will be, unfortunately. As mothers, we do whatever we can to keep our babies safe, but as a human, we can only do so much. At the end of the day, I just need to be grateful that it wasn’t worse and know that I am now better prepared for whatever the future may hold. While my daughter’s smile is a little different these days, it’s still her behind it — tooth trauma and all.
For more information on what to do in case your child experiences an injury to a tooth, check out this resource.
