Your Halloween Dental Emergency Guide!

As you prepare the kids for Halloween trick-or-treating, your mind is probably focused on those finishing touches on costumes and making sure they have the perfectly-sized pumpkin-shaped bucket to house their candy for that long night ahead.

What’s probably furthest from your mind is the possibility of a dental emergency ruining your family’s Halloween fun! That’s why they call them emergencies; you certainly don’t plan for them, and they can quickly put a stop to your child’s trick-or-treating adventures.

But not this year! You have our team at Matthew J. Cavendish to help should your family have a dental emergency this season.

Today, we’re guiding you through possible dental problems that may threaten your Halloween fun and how to keep those problems from zapping the excitement of your little ghosts and goblins!

Common Dental Emergencies On Halloween

One of the things that make emergencies problematic is that, in most cases, they require the help of a medical professional of some kind. This is fine if you’re talking about a bodily injury, right?

You break an arm or sprain an ankle, and you call 911 or head to your nearest emergency room. But with an injury that affects your mouth, lips, teeth, cheeks, or gums, you need emergency services from a skilled dentist. And that’s not something you typically find in a local hospital’s emergency ward.

That’s why it helps to have a plan in place in the event of this kind of emergency. First, here are two of the most common dental emergencies we see around Halloween:

A Loose Or Knocked-Out Tooth

You’re out with the family trick-or-treating through the neighborhood. Even with street lights and the flashlight, you’re carrying around, often you’re fighting the forces of darkness and rambunctious little ghouls you can barely keep up with. So despite your best efforts, there’s a higher risk on Halloween of kids tripping and falling on a curb or sidewalk and knocking out a tooth.

A Broken Tooth

We’ve seen families around Halloween where a child has bitten into a piece of hard candy in just the right way, and they’ve broken a tooth. This is fairly common. Let’s face it; it’s tough to keep kids from getting a little too excited about their candy stash and impatiently biting into a piece of candy that needs to be eaten slowly!

Tips For Handling a Halloween Dental Emergency

In any dental emergency, no matter the time of year, it’s always important to know who to call for help. So the first thing we recommend for handling an injury to the mouth is to call Matthew J. Cavendish, DDS.

As soon as you finish reading today’s blog, go ahead and store our Phoenix, AZ dental office contact number on your phone. You can reach us at 602-835-1304 when you need help, and someone will guide you through the next steps depending on the specifics of your emergency.

This simple step will take most of the stress of your typical dental emergencies out of the equation! But you can also take steps to avoid these incidents altogether.

For starters, you can sit down as a family and talk about trick-or-treating safety. If your kids know what’s expected of them beforehand, you won’t have to fight to keep up with them all night and risk them getting hurt.

You’ll have a flashlight with you to light a path for them, but it helps if they know not to run ahead of you. Big, complicated costumes combined with the darkness of night can be a recipe for a dental emergency, but not if you keep them close enough to you that they can get through the neighborhood carefully.

Another tip is to make sure your kids know not to start digging through their candy buckets until you get home. That way you can reduce the risk of one of the kids breaking a tooth on a piece of hard candy because for one thing, you’ll be there to make sure the candy they choose is safe.

Along with that, once you’re home, the kids will be a bit more relaxed. They’ll feel less anxious to get from house to house and less likely to eat their candy too quickly and possibly injure a tooth.

Don’t Let Dental Emergency Ruin Your Family’s Halloween!

Trust our team here in Phoenix, AZ! Save our contact number in your phone, and we will do all we can to help. Until then, we wish your family a Happy Halloween!
Call Matthew J. Cavendish, DDS at 602-835-1304 or fill out our online form to schedule a non-emergency appointment.