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I should start by saying that I’m 26, about to turn 27 and I do not have a cosmetic need for braces. I get a lot of surprised looks from people who know me, not sure why I got the braces in the first place.

When I was 10 and 12, I had 2 molars (#6 teeth) pulled out on both sides. My teeth #7 and 8 have drifted closer to front and tipped in. When I open my mouth and you look from above, it actually looks like I have all my teeth in a row, no spacing. However, at the root level, my 7 and 8 teeth are tipped. There are large spaces at the root level and food always gets stuck there, it’s very hard to clean out those spaces, and I’ve had a few fillings on those teeth at the gum line. Lots of spacing actually makes it harder to clean teeth, than if they were very tight!

I got the idea to get braces in December 2005 and I lost sleep over it! I wasn’t sure if my husband would be supportive, since this is a pretty significant outlay of money (all out-of-pocket, we don’t have insurance) and he could reasonably say “Honey, your teeth are fine”.

So for 2 weeks I just tossed and turned, not sure how to even bring up this idea. Finally, lack of good sleep and anxiety made me break down. I just told it to my husband as it is – I don’t need it, but I want it, and it’s making me very weepy and won’t let me sleep. There was no resistance, just lots of eye-rolling on his part.

Ok, now that was out of the way and fully “sanctioned” . Next step would be to choose a doctor. I’ll just make this very short: I went to see 5 orthodontists and only chose to see specialists. I’m sure there are dentists good at ortho work out there, but I didn’t want to take my chances. By mid-February I selected an orthodontist that I felt was a perfect fit personality-wise, offered a solution to my problem that I could live with and, surprisingly, charged a very reasonable fee.
I’m in Toronto and my braces cost me $5,800 for all-ceramic Clarity brackets on both top and bottom. Each arch is $500 for upgrading to ceramics, so all-metal would’ve been $4,800. I’m too vain to be a metal-mouth, and even though Clarity brackets are slightly bigger than metal and my mouth feels fuller, I haven’t regretted my decision yet.

Besides a slightly larger size and fuller feel, there’s another downside to the ceramics. The brackets themselves are made of porcelain and do not stain no matter what you eat or drink; but he archwires (the metal wires) are being held in place using rubber elastics which are clear, that is they’re clear at the beginning and as time goes by, they take on the color of some foods, namely: tomato sauces, curries, dark berries, beets, coffee, tea, wine etc.

You eventually work out a weird system of eating coloring foods, flipping it with your tongue to the roof of the mouth, by-passing the front of the teeth And I now drink coffee and tea trough a straw (only once the drinks cool, of course! Wouldn’t want to be drinking chemicals the plastic straw releases into my hot drinks). But my ortho – and most of them, from what I hear – won’t mind replacing the elastics as often as you need. I got them grossly yellow a couple of times and went in for a replacement. I also go nuts with curries and wine before any emergency appointments or adjustments because I know they can replace the elastics without any extra trips.

On March 29th, 2006 I had the braces fitted. This is what it looked like: