Did anyone else go through the braces phase as a preteen/teenager? I did. So did my brother and some cousins. My uncle was our orthodontist.  I remember my mom driving us forty-five minutes (one way) to his office about once a month for our appointments. I also remember her taking us to get milkshakes after our adjustments because when he would tighten those suckers up, your mouth would be too sore for actual food.

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this, right?

Well, a few weeks back, I noticed Reba doing some repetitive licking and swallowing. Strange. So I checked her mouth thinking maybe she had gotten something stuck in the roof of her mouth. Well, come to find out she had busted a tooth! She broke the whole pointy portion (I believe those are called cusps) of the major upper molar exposing the pulp. Then had a slab fracture that hadn’t completely fractured off, but I could see the crack of it going up under her gum. Ouch!

You can see the dark portion to the left of my thumb, which is the exposed pulp.

Of course, I called my vet right away. The only problem was she was still nursing the pups and they were too young to be away from her all day to have it taken care of. So I scheduled her appointment out a ways when the pups were old enough. In the meantime, I started soaking her food to make things easy.

Dogs are tough creatures. After soaking her food for a couple days, I caught her crunching away on Hope’s food one day. Then another day she was on the couch munching away on a big bone! (Which was probably the culprit in the broken tooth). So I figured that tooth wasn’t giving her too much pain.

The day finally came for her appointment and everything went well. After picking her up, I decided to get her a special treat. I knew she was probably really hungry since I had to withhold food from her after 8:00pm the night before and that her mouth would be sore from the dental surgery and sutures required to mend things.

So I stopped at McDonald’s and bought her ice cream. Her first ever!

Digging in with her teeth now.

She really enjoyed it. And don’t worry, I didn’t let her eat the whole thing! And no, I didn’t finish it. 😉

Sometimes ice cream just makes things better. 🙂