One month in braces

So at the one month mark I still have not seen much progress if any. I must say I am a bit disappointed. I know I may be a bit impatient but I was at least hoping for a gap to close. My bottoms have not been for more than two weeks so I can't expect much there. Just noticed recently that I have another molar rotated but its not as bad as the other one. It was still and ARRGGGGHHH moment nonetheless.



I made the HORRIBLE mistake on chowing down on a wrap I ordered that I forgot contained mustard.Yeah so now my ligatures are lime green. You can't see it unless its close up but I know its lime green. No amount of attempts to baking soda,Listerine Whitening, whitening toothpaste is helping. Sigh, good thing I told them I was changing them before the next wedding in two weeks.Unortunately for you all I took the pics after the mustard incident.



The bottom brackets are feeling fine although my mouth is generally drier.Very little irritation. I took out the all plastic tongue barbell and put back in the metal one. No correction, I took out the half of the plastic barbell that I did not swallow and put in the metal one. I keep losing the o-ring that holds it in place underneath while I'm eating. I swallowed like 3 this week. I don't really want to order more right now and at the rate I'm eating them they won't last long.
Sigh.

You can call me....The Shredder!

So I can really identify right now with this guy, known as The Shredder. You may remember him from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies (the old school ones NOT TMNT). Aside from the fact that we now have a striking resemblance with all this metal in my mouth, I have literally become the shredder.No dental floss is safe around me!!

Now I guess because my top teeth were ok to begin with and were more spaced than crowded I did not forsee the problems I am now experiencing. When I flossed the top teeth I took about 10 minutes tops. And thats me taking my time. I got to be so good at it that I no longer needed to use the floss threaders to get under the archwire. Then again I had the fact that I am very handy with a needle and thread to my advantage. With my bottom metal brackets installed it has become IMPOSSIBLE to floss between some of the teeth. First there is the problem where my teeth apparently shifted overnight so the floss physically cannot pass between the teeth. Then there is the situation where the brackets are riding on top of each other so closely that you can't even see where the wire is to thread beneath it. So I was forced to start using the floss threaders for my bottom teeth which has now extending my floss time by about 10 mins. Yeah so I basically need a half hour to 'brush' my teeth.

In addition to which the metal brackets now shred just about every piece of floss that dares to come close. I have to pull at least four lengths of floss just to get through the bottom teeth. It is amazing that my teeth could be so close together even though the orientation does not seem to have changed.

I have also developed an unfortunate habit. Now that everything I eat sticks up in the braces ,I tend to run my tongue over them to try and dislodge the food as I am eating. This turned out to be a bad idea because now I am blistering the tip of my tongue. It literally took me the past few days to figureout why my tongue was feeling so sensitive. Yet another challenge in this journey.

Lowers Braced!

Well I got my lowers done today. I got the metal brackets. The process was just as uneventful as the uppers. On looking at the end result I had a harsh wake up call. I realised I was really being a bit delusional as to the status of my teeth. All along I was saying that they are ok and I was just being vain by fixing them. No. They are messed up. It really takes the installation of the brackets and the wire to get a true sense of how your teeth are orientated (or rather disorientated). When I saw how many kinks were in the wire and how one bracket on my incisor could not even fit on the rotated tooth I was both embarrassed and relieved for myself. Embarrassed that they have to look this OBVIOUSLY bad for awhile and relieved that I actually took the step to do something about it. Can you look at those pics? I did not even know that molar to my left side was completely turned the wrong way!

A few hours later they generally feel ok but I am starting to feel the pressure on that naughty incisor that is jutting out. I have a feeling tomorrow will be much worse than how my uppers felt on day two. I also discovered that I in fact DON'T have self-litigating braces on my rear molars on the uppers. The assistant put a grey ligature on the bracket instead of a clear one so I did not realise that it had a ligature at all. I enquired as to when I could hope to see my upper spaces closing adn I was told that she the ortho was not going to start closing until they were all aligned properly...SIGH. My lowers also have grey ligatures. I did not even bother with the clear ones on the bottom, I have a hard enough time keeping the top ones clean.Ironically I also learned that the guy in the wedding who interrogated me also went to the same ortho. I should have scrutinised him more to see his end results.

So now I have the best of both worlds and hopefully i will really see some action soon!

Here comes the braceface

So i stopped off at the ortho Friday to get my ligatures changed for the wedding I had to attend yesterday. Although I had advised the receptionist that i was coming in and the reason, the ortho assistants asked me what my emergency was. To which I responded,"I need to look fabulous and I can't do so with yellowed ligs". So the change took a minute if so much.They actually asked me if i wanted a colour to match my dress to which i responded, " Hells no".I then asked the ortho about my appointment on Monday to get my lower brackets. I was shocked when she told me that I would NOT be getting the self litigating brackets because it would not match the prescription she had in place for me. It was only after I left that I realised that the brackets I have further to the back of my teeth don't have ligatures. So if those are not self litigating then what are they? Hmmm I need to ask her again.

In regards to the wedding,the brackets definitely were not my favourite accesory. I was dressed to kill but I still felt a bit self conscious. I was not self conscious when I first got them , I guess cause the people who had already seen me with them were closer friends who already knew I was getting them so it was no big deal. Last week I got a visit from a friendly collegue who stopped by my desk on his way out from a meeting at my office and after a while of chit chat he came out and asked me if I always had braces. When I told him no, he said he figured as much cause I was playing with them as I was talking. I think I was actually trying to hide them as I knew I had curry that day and they were even yellower than before! YUCK! Then at the hairdresser Saturday morning another acquaintance asked me the same thing. Which again just made me feel like I was getting my close up on national t.v. I don't mind people asking when its a constructive comment. Cause to me the only point of asking about them is if you are interested in the process or getting them yourself. By just stating/asking, "Oh you got braces" and saying nothing further is just pointing out the obvious. So its better if you just say nothing at all, you already figured out I have them on all by yourself.

So after getting some shots to my ego, I get to the wedding and the best man asks me like 5 times throughout the reception why I have braces. The first few times I was with a friend and I figured it was a rhetorical question cause to me it pretty self explanatory WHY you have braces. Then he was like 'Oh, so cause everybody getting married now and you run out to get braces." I guess this was on account that its a general consensus that my boyfriend is eventually going to marry me (hint hint honey). Of course this has been in the back of my mind, more because I don't want to have jacked up teeth when the wedding day does come period (regardless of who I end up marrying).It certainly was not the reason I got braces. Then later on when I was with my boyfriend , the guy again asked why I had braces. By then he was asking my boyfriend more than me cause I was not really entertaning him. My boyfriend also ignored him at a first cause then he would start talking about something else and then somehow go back to my braces. I think my boyfriend eventually got a bit annoyed and snapped at him, "Why the hell do you think she got braces? The same reason you did!". I had to bit my tongue to keep from laughing scandalously. I had no idea the guy ever had braces. The guy seemed a bit stung but went on to explain that he got braces cause he had an incisor in the roof of his mouth so he had little choice but he had never seen anything wrong with my teeth so he could not understand what the purpose was. I think I was a bit more sympathetic once I heard he used to have braces and had that bad a problem. So I told him that my top teeth did not really need fixing but my bottom did. Then he was like 'but you only have on the top'. (Sigh) Then I had to explain that I had to open my bite to get the bottom installed. Thankfully after I explained he seemed satisfied enough to stop harping on it and did not ask me anything about it for the rest of the night.

The damage was already done however and I felt like I had flashing lights on my teeth for the rest of the night. Funnily enough after having a few drinks, my sensitivity increased and I felt like I wanted to rip them out my mouth.Before I got my upper bracket installation appointment I was actually considering scheduling it for after the wedding so I would not have them for the occasion.It so happens I got my spacers unexpectedly early and was forced to install earlier than expected. When I had accepted that I would have to go to the wedding with my braces whether I liked it or not, I was again relieved that the ortho would not be doing my lowers until after.Then I got to thinking why the hell was I so concerned about that in the first place? Why was I postponing my treatment on account of what other people may (or may not) think? At one point I told myself I to just shake it off because at the end of the day my teeth will be absolutely perfect so to hell with what everyone else has to say. My teeth will be perfect for my wedding so I really should not care how it looks at theirs. Anyhow you take it, I have another wedding to go to next month and I will definitely be fully braced so let everyone else better deal with it.