The surgery was very quick and uneventful. We left the house at 5:31 a.m. (yipes!) had a tough snowy drive down there, and were on our way home by 8:15. I was able to stay long enough to see them put the laughing gas mask on her (think big blue clown nose with tubes) and the cannula in her arm, and then I had to leave. I don't think the procedure took more than 20 minutes, though. When I came back in, they had moved her to a curtained recovery chair. She was seeing double, as they had said she would, and was pretty panicky. She just kept asking over and over again whether it was over already, and had they put the stitches in, and were they going to do anything else, and were the stitches already in, and was there anything else, and how was it over so fast...I had to try hard not to laugh. She also had a gob of gauze in her mouth and didn't know it, making her really hard to understand. When I finally convinced her to stop talking to me and rest, she went back to sleep for 15 minutes.When she awoke again, I knew she felt better because her eyes were clear.
Then the doctor came in to tell us what he found, which was...nothing! No cyst. Only an air pocket and a little clear fluid. There was nothing to send to pathology for testing. The tooth came out whole, so the surgery was uncomplicated, and he just scraped the bone to encourage bone regrowth, and stitched her up.
I am not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I wish he could have aspirated the area first and found out that it was air, and then perhaps we could have saved the tooth. It's hard to reconcile myself to putting her through all that, when there was nothing there, but apparently we couldn't have known that. It makes me wonder what the CT Scan report said, but I looked at those scans myself, and something was there. So, is it a healing? Maybe. Basically the doctor treated it as if it were the worst possible type of cyst, and it wasn't that. I am thankful because she won't have to have the follow-up x-rays as often as he originally said. We will get one in 6 months, and go from there.
After the surgery, we had a harrowing ride home in the snow. I took Todd's little car because mine is no good in the snow, but I still didn't like the ride. The roads looked as if they hadn't been plowed, even when I was traveling 1/4 mile behind a snowplow. The ride took almost 2 hours, including a stop at McDonalds for a smoothie for her (without a straw!) and some breakfast for me. I was so happy to get home, but the car got stuck in the driveway when I stopped to put up the garage door. Then, after I rocked it back and forth in the snow to get it into the garage ever so carefully, I heard the hiss of all the air leaving the front tire. Of all the places to get a flat tire, I think one's own garage is the best! Last Monday, we canceled the Girl's recheck on the surgery because of another blizzard, and then it snowed last night and this morning! Now, it has rained all day (sounds like freezing rain now), and will rain all day tomorrow too. Tomorrow is the new appointment for follow-up. I hope it is the end of the story. For our next adventure, we get spacers for orthodontic work on Monday.
Edit 4/7/11- The actual name for the cyst is "traumatic bone cyst," which is really no cyst at all. We'll have a follow-up x-ray in 6 months at the dentist's office.
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