Teeth, teeth, teeth part 2

So the teeth saga is continuing in our world. Things amongst our girls haven't changed, Trinity is still hanging on by a thread to her second tooth, Addison is still popping her i-theeth through the gums as is Emory with her molars, the continuance...or maybe I should say the extreme drama is with Greg's Mom.

I'll share a brief history of her with you so you can appreciate her situation a bit better. She has extremely severe rheumatoid arthritis and has for 30+ years (she was in her 20's when she was diagnosed). With her arthritis she gets "flare ups" in her joints regularly. These usually go away with a brief treatment of strong medication and really like to come on as she is recovering from some kind of sickness when her immune system is at is most vulnerable; rheumatoid also causes your recovery from illness to take quite a bit longer than the average person.

On the 1st of July she came down with a stomach bug, causing her to not only miss all the 4th of July festivities, but also her grandson's birthday amongst other things. Well, as the stomach bug was going away she developed a knot on her jaw joint. Assuming it was a flare up her doc gave her some medication and sent her on the way. When the meds were gone the knot was smaller, but still present and still painful. They tried an additional medication and it did nothing! The two doctors she had been seeing for help with this over the three week time period decided it might be a tooth causing some or all of this condition, so she went to the dentist. Sure enough there was a root canal gone from several years ago which had gone bad, so she went to an oral surgeon and they squeezed her in the schedule, got that tooth out and sent her on her way, hoping (but not promising) her issue had been resolved. Well, a few days later the swelling was immensely larger, we're talking a second head coming out the side of her head larger! I mean seriously huge swelling!!!!! With that kind of swelling and problem comes insane pain and discomfort! She talked to the oral surgeon and her physician and they agreed something else must be going on for there to be such incredible swelling, so she went to the ER.

After sitting in the ER for 12+ hours on Monday/Tuesday she finally got to see a doctor. The doc gave her a prescription for a really strong antibiotic and sent her on her way. By the grace of God she ended up being walked to an oral surgeons office who is on staff at this hospital and he took a look at her case (thank God he wasn't too busy that day!). Sure enough her molar had abscessed (I think that's the right word) and was causing SERIOUS infection and ALL this swelling was...(I'm grossed out to even think it)...puss! They scheduled surgery for the following day, got her in made several incisions, drained this stuff, attached temporary drains to the incision locations and stitched her back up. Her surgery was on Wednesday morning, today is Friday afternoon, and she is STILL in the hospital! This was some serious infection!

So this is truly a story about how teeth can wreak havoc on your life! Thanks for reading!