Monday, January 24, 2011

Oral Surgery Adventure

We've just returned from seeing an oral surgeon about a cyst in The Girl's jaw.  While we had to wait way too long, considering the office wasn't even busy, I liked the doctor quite a bit. 
Before he came into the room I heard him stop outside the door to look through our papers.  Then I heard him mutter, "Oh, interesting...."

Just what I wanted to hear.  Kinda glad the girl was in the bathroom at that point.  She was trying the old trick that we use at restaurants...if you get up and go to the bathroom, the food will come.  Turns out it works with doctors, too.  When she came back in and found him there, I could tell she wanted to laugh out loud!

The cyst can be seen plainly on her x-ray.  The dentist noticed it on her panoramic x-ray back in September, but we were waiting for insurance to kick in before we went to the surgeon.  The doctor said he sees this once about every 3 years, and that's with 50-60 people going through the office in a day.  Normally they would form after a root canal or from an infection, but she has never had any issue with her teeth.  Back in September the dentist said that it would compress a nerve and could even break her jaw if left untreated.  The doctor today could feel the soft but firm spot on the inside of her gums with his finger, but she can't feel it and has never complained of any pain there.  Nonetheless in order to get the whole thing out, he feels he will likely have to take the tooth, too.  It looks as though the roots are not in the bone, anyway, so it is already probably not viable.  He said, "Good catch, dentist."

Our next step is to get a CT Scan.  I am calling ahead to make sure that the place we will go can actually handle a scan on the "mandible with attention to the roots of tooth #19," because I only want to do this once, and it sounds like an unusual request to me.  After that, we will schedule her procedure, which will be done under laughing gas and anesthesia in the office.  Good times.  After they get it out, it will be sent away for pathology so he can tell us exactly what it was.  (It's not cancer, he assures me.)  She will have to have follow-up x-rays frequently.  The doctor said he knew one patient who had it come back after 28 years!  As for losing the tooth, she is young so her bones will rebuild, and the third molar and wisdom tooth will take the space.  So maybe she will not have to have the wisdom tooth out in the future. 

This kid...always with the strange diagnoses.  She has a geographic tongue, too.  I think she should become a medical professional so she can tell patients, "Yeah, I've had that too..." all the time!  Although she seemed nervous in the office, she didn't burst into tears when we got to the car, so I guess she'll be okay through it all.  A "work in progress" series of blog posts is in the making.

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