Welcome to

We were at the mall, when I decided to have a sandwich before a long shopping spree. Of course a good cleaning is due after a meal, so I rinsed a lot with mineral water and used my Stimu-Dent pick (totally disgusted by mall bathrooms and you can’t pay me enough to brush my teeth there).

I love my Stim-U-Dents, they are really handy, but I wasn’t careful and popped an elastic from the implant. This is actually the first time it happened to me. I usually clean teeth with a mirror and poke around carefully. So instead of shopping we rushed off to the ortho office - without calling in first! I only did it because I knew for sure they were open today and my emergency wouldn’t take long.

Frankly, I was happy I had an excuse to go there, because a wire started hurting me a couple of weeks ago - my teeth have shifted and about 4mm(!) was sticking out and poking my cheek. It takes me about an hour to get to the ortho office (the closest one of the 2 they operate), and it just didn’t seem like enough of a reason to waste half a day. It hurt, sure, but by now I’m used to dealing with all sorts of minorly irritating types of pain. Plus the wire sticking out is not something that can affect my tooth movement as far as I know. However an elastic out of place can mess up the teeth. Having 2 reasons, one of them important, was enough to convince me to go in for an emergency.

To be fair, it’s not that bad. In the first 2 months of my treatment I had 6 emergency appointments. Now that I’m a year into the treatment, I rarely have any emergencies at all.

A tragedy averted: wire trimmed and elastic put back on. Took a total of 43 seconds (plus an hour to get back). Sigh… Ah the trouble we go to for health and beauty.