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Saturday, February 22, 2014

Labial Frenectomy II

Two years ago (almost to the day) Rachel managed to give herself a labial frenectomy.

This afternoon Benjamin fell down the deck stairs and gave himself a fat lip. Blood was dribbling out of his mouth, splattering on his shirt, pooling on the ground (or so I'm told—I was in a gastroenteritis-induced stupor). Andrew cleaned him off and then brought him to me. We cuddled on the couch to watch some Daniel Tiger while I attempted to hold ice on his lip.

Benjamin wasn't very interested in having that happen.

"Col'! Col'!" he ket telling me and shoving my hand away.

"How does your lip feel?" we'd ask and he'd put his hand up to feel it before whimpering, "Goo[d]."

"Can I look at it?"

"Nooooo!"

It didn't look too terrible this afternoon.

Benjamin's lip this afternoon



It didn't look too terrible when we put him to bed.

But he's been sleeping rather fitfully, waking up and crying, so I went in to check on him and was shocked to see how big his lip had swelled.

Benjamin's lip this evening

The poor guy can't even close his mouth! It's so bad!


He wasn't entirely happy about my investigations but was too sleepy to protest much so I got a much better look at what was going on.


His labial frenulum is completely shredded, poor guy.


The chip on his front tooth is old. I'm not even sure when he did it (he falls down a lot—when your head is in the 50th (+) percentile and the rest of your body is in the 0th (-) percentile things get a little topsy turvy) but I know he's had it for several weeks (maybe even months).


We gave him some ibuprofen to hopefully help the swelling go down. I'm slightly worried about his teeth (though I wasn't nearly as worried this afternoon as I am now); he has a dentist appointment on Thursday. Hopefully his mouth will heal up nicely and his teeth will all stay securely in place.

He would've been a candidate for an actual labial frenectomy at some point in the future, I'm sure, because his frenulum extended right between his front teeth (in fact, I used to worry his teeth would never come together, though obviously they did).

When he was a few weeks old he had a lingual frenectomy (because he was tongue tied) and I must admit that I prefer clinical frenectomies to accidental frenectomies! They're much cleaner and far less traumatic.

2 comments:

  1. Yikes that looks painful! I actually had a frenectonomy before I got braces but they actually left part of it and then later I got hit in the face and the part that was left tore :-/. Probably just easier to have it out of the way :). When my kids are bleeding I always just take a wash cloth and put it under cold water and tell them to suck on it. They are much more receptive to that then ice and it usually keeps their blood off the floor. Hope his poor little face and teeth end up ok :(.

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  2. I just went through and actually read the story of Rachel's frenectomy. I had the stomach flu two years ago, too! Weird!

    We tried to have him suck on a wet cloth, too, but he wasn't having it, which is why I tried the ice, which he also wasn't a fan of (which probably explains the swelling). Good news: it looked much better this morning (still bad, but better).

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