Welcome to

5 days into my treatment I had to go in for an emergency appointment. I had so much movement that the upper teeth were chipping agains my bottom brackets. I have to say I only noticed because I was reading about it in a forum! I didn’t pay attention to the pressing feeling in my upper teeth, but when I looked, a good chunk of my upper right canine tooth was already chipped off in a neat rectangular pattern (some of the enamel has self-restored since then but the corner-shaped dent is still visible). If you have a slight – or not so slight underbite – watch out for this.

When I went to see the doctor, they had me fitted with occlusal bumps. The bumps are made of the same cement they use to bond brackets, but they color it blue so when it’s time to take them off, they’ll be able to tell it apart from the tooth.

This is 5 days into the treatment and right before I got the occlusal bumps. If you look closely on MY right upper, you can see the canine tooth sitting on top of a bracket.

3 weeks after braces were fitted (this was the best pic of the bumps I found).You can see my elastics are already slightly yellowed. Even though I’ve been drinking everything through a straw, some of it seeps through to the front of the teeth.

The bumps separate your upper and lower jaws, so you end up with a slightly open mouth – at all times. They make hard not just to eat, it’s hard to BREATH. For me in some ways this was worse than fitting of the braces themselves. For 3 days I felt a terrible strain in my neck, impossible to breath or swallow. Basically, I felt strangled.

With each uncomfortable adjustment it gets easier though. Your body must adjust to survive. It takes 2-3 weeks at most for your brain to get used to even most extreme new setups in the mouth, and usually it takes just a few days.