Marissa's Bionic Teeth

Marissa had chronic ear infections the first year of her life. Her nose was constantly running, her ears always aching, and she was a downright miserable kid. When she turned one she got ear tubes, which drained the nasty infectious stuff so at least she could sleep at night, but ironically it didn't prevent the infections. (I will not describe the scene to you of waking her up many mornings with ear drainage smeared across her face, her pillow, and making her hair stick up. Okay, I guess I kinda just did. Plus...it smelled and she needed many, many baths. Her sheets were washed nightly.)

This pattern continued despite the ear tubes. Her nose ran constantly. We stopped wiping it all the time and considered the initial layer a protective coating that kept her skin from rubbing off with every wipe of a tissue. None of the other parents at daycare would set up play dates with her, they thought she was always sick. And, she was.

She would get a cold which would turn into an infection. We would go to the doctor who would prescribe antibiotics. It would clear up eventually, but the minute the antibiotics stopped, it started all over again. She needed stronger and stronger antibiotics, which also did a number on her tummy. Poor kid.

We finally sought the opinion of her ENT who suggested that removing her adenoids may help. He had barely said the words and we scheduled the surgery. He wanted to do one more round of antibiotics "just to see if it would clear up," but she'd practically been on them her entire life, what would one more week do? We were tired and frustrated of having a cranky, unhealthy kid.

Around her second birthday she had her adenoids removed; the change was immediate and dramatic. By the evening of the surgery, she was smiley and playful. I didn't want to put her to bed when it was bedtime, it was such a treat to see her so happy. In the morning she woke up singing! Or babbling. Or something other than the howl we heard most mornings. Looking back, it must've been like waking up with a full-on sinus infection every single morning of her life. Such joy she must have felt awaking without a headache and a clogged skull.

Her nose cleared up, her ears cleared up, and any cold she caught after that stayed exactly that: a cold. No more drainage, no more nastiness, and we had a super happy baby. Yeay!

She grew and grew, and at age 6 began losing her teeth. One of the first teeth she lost was replaced with a tooth of the most unusual yellow, almost chalky white around the edges. Her dentist murmured something about "malformed enamel," and that was that.

Then another tooth came up with an interesting pattern of clear and white enamel. And another. We changed to a pediatric dentist who first used the word "hyoplastic enamel." Thus began our education.

Hypoplastic enamel is enamel that malformed while the adult teeth were maturing in her head during the first years of life. I learned a lot about tooth maturation. Ever see the skull of a child with the dental cavities exposed? It's creepy. I can see where the director got the idea for the creature's mouth hole in "Alien." You are born with adult teeth buds in your skull, and during your first few years of life they grow into the adult teeth that eventually push down into your jawbone once your head is big enough for the fully grown teeth. It's quite an extraordinary feat of human anatomy.

A child's skull with dental sinuses exposed. Creepy!
Especially that canine tooth way up there.

So why do some people develop hypoplastic enamel? Recent studies have pointed to chronic antibiotic use in infanthood as a probable cause.

Let me say that again: Chronic. Antibiotic use. In babies.

My death stare. Is it as intimidating as my kids say it is?

At age 12, Marissa already has 3 fillings, one crown and a capped baby tooth. The baby molar needed a cap because the enamel all around the edge of her gums literally disintegrated. It was like a cavity encircling her tooth; there was no way to "fill" it, and no point in anything more than a cap since it was a baby tooth and was going to fall out anyway. She recently lost that tooth, and we joked about her "cybergenetic" or "bionic" tooth.

Marissa's "bionic" baby molar.

When she had the crown done recently, the dentist told me that as she began to file down the existing tooth it literally crumbled under the slightest pressure of her tool. Her current crown will need to be replaced when she's 18, and eventually she will probably need an implanted tooth because the dentist isn't confident that the root of the tooth can hold.

Remember my last blog post, about my phobia of bad teeth? Marissa is going to face a lifetime of expensive dental work, filling, repairing and replacing her teeth through the years.

I'm angry that her permanent teeth were permanently ruined. all because she had a runny nose when she was a baby. Had we known then what we know now we would have insisted on more aggressive intervention earlier to reduce our antibiotic use.