Welcome to

I had my braces taken off today, which was a total surprise. I’m too tired to post any more details or pictures, but will be sure to blog an update tomorrow. Check back!

I’m not going to post a lot of updates, mainly because I’m getting tired of the whole topic of braces. I’m almost done with my treatment. At my last adjustment on Nov 27th Doctor said I had “two-three-four months” maximum. I can’t wait!!!

Once the braces are off, I will post before and after photos and Panorex’es. I’ve already had an Xray done and am absolutely amazed at the amount of change. Also very happy to see that my smile is returning to what it was about 12-15 years ago - almost perfect!

Next update will be after January 22nd, my 15th adjustment date. I should be getting permanent retainers, which we agreed with the doctor don’t have to be permanent. He does recommend that all his patients wear them forever, but we talked about it and he said that if after 1 or 2 years of wearing them, I want to take them off it’s okay. Some people do it with okay results. After the initial 1-2 year setting period I should be able to get away with it as long as I’m diligent about wearing my Essix (clear) retainer nightly.

I noticed I have a specific achy pattern:
- right after an adjustment, my teeth are achy for about a week
- then I get an occasional achy day but nothing majorly persistent for about 3 weeks
- 2 weeks prior to the adjustment

I’ve been on this 6-week cycle for about 8 months now.

I’m getting vertical “smoker’s lines” on my top lip. I noticed them just in the past 2 weeks. I think it’s due to 1) drinking all my dark drinks (coffee, tea, red wine) through a straw - that’s some serious puckering I do; 2) force-closing my mouth. Since my bite is pretty open at the moment, I have to make an effort to keep it closed.

Now I’m forcing myself to relax the mouth and keep it open all the time. This forms a yucky film on the brackets and I’m having to wipe and clean them throughout the day, but hopefully the lips will relax a bit.

I’m pretty sure it’s mostly because of drinking through a straw, and I stopped using them. Of course, my ligatures (elastics) will stain much quicker but for the moment I’m not too worried: my next adjustment is in a week!

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.