Welcome to

Less than 2 months into the treatment I had my first adjustment. They changed my wire from a soft round one, to a square 20-gauge one. The new wire looks thicker, darker and is much sturdier.

Even according to the ortho, my teeth have made some incredible progress in less than 2 months, so my treatment is progressing by 2-4 months quicker than even he anticipated! That means that at my next adjustment on July 19th, they will add on micro-implants.

Usually micro-implants mean teeth implants or something like that. In my case however, it means that they’ll put titanium screws into my jaw bone in several places. Then they will anchor my back teeth to these screws so my back teeth will be pulled by the screws, without relying on my front teeth. Normally, people get powerchains or rubberbands to do this for them, however my bite and teeth alignment in the front are excellent according to the doctor and he doesn’t want to break that balance, so he’s going to use this fairly new technology on me. I’m very excited and what’s fun – all assistants at my ortho’s practice are also very excited, it’s a fairly new and interesting procedure for them (apparently it’s been practiced in Europe for 5 years and only 2 years or so in North America).

My upper midline has shifted and I now have spacing between my bottom center teeth but this is only temporary and will be all ok by the end of treatment. Teeth move around all the time, they literally change position and feel every day. I’m still not enjoying the “sponge” teeth feeling. I’ll be talking one minute, then I close my mouth and without even hitting the teeth very hard, I can feel them change position!

My teeth have moved very quickly so far, so I’m hoping my estimated 18-month treatment will be cut down to a year or so.

Progress photo:

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.

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: