As many of you know, we discovered that Loren had an oral cyst in late June. We went to the first oral surgeon and this is the x-ray that we got to see. That hole in the lower right of the picture is the cyst and should all be bone. Eeek!
After our trip to Utah we went to a second oral surgeon and he recommended a biopsy to see what we were dealing with and to get a better treatment plan in place for Loren. (Why the first surgeon didn't do this, I don't know but I'm so grateful for this oral surgeon.)
The biopsy was more invasive than we thought it would be, so we had a lopsided chipmunk on our hands for a few days.
When the biopsy came back it was determined that Loren had an Odontogenic Keratocyst. It's a cyst that many oral surgeons will just remove, especially in children, but the oral surgeon gave us two options. A) remove the cyst and all the bone, teeth and tissue within 2 cms of the cyst. This would mean that they would have had to remove basically the whole lower left side of his jaw and then reconstruct it(and all that goes with that over the years - bone grafting, dental implants, etc...). Or B) try putting a stent into the cyst and flush the cyst daily with a antibiotic liquid to see if the cyst would stop growing, start shrinking and let the bone grow back on its own.
We opted for the stent, which looks like this. (Sorry if this is gross - but I think it's kind of interesting.) If you could have seen it before they put it in you would have seen what looks like a mini trumpet mouthpiece and they just stuck it down into the cyst.
Luckily this procedure wasn't invasive so he's had no pain with this - he was playing frisbee just hours after getting it put in.
The biggest concern with this option is that Loren has to keep it really clean. He has to flush it after every meal and can't eat hard foods that could get stuck in it. He's been amazing. We taught him how to flush it and he privately goes into the bathroom to flush it out after eating. When we went to our follow-up visit for the oral surgeon to check on this I mentioned how good Loren had been and he told me that over our few visits he had determined that Loren was mature enough to handle this extra care with his jaw and that is why he gave us the option to do the stent. I'm proud of Loren for being so responsible - he's an amazing kid.
This will be a process. It will be 6-9 months before the bone could grow back completely and if it doesn't grow back all the way we could still have to do the surgery to remove the cyst and graft in some bone. Hopefully all will go well and we don't have to go that route, but time will tell.
We're feeling very grateful that all seems to be going well, that we have an amazing oral surgeon who cares about Loren, we hope that the bone will start growing back soon and that I'll have a good x-ray with more bone to show you soon!
