The Initial Appointment

I made the initial appointment to confirm that I was going to go through with this.

At that appointment the first thing the dentist wanted to know was what were my plans for the next few years? Which i thought was an odd question, but it turns out that because this process will take at least 2 yrs then he was checking that I wasn’t going to be moving out of the country, realise I’d always wanted to be man or find something else that was going to stop me halfway through and that I would able to follow through with the work. It’s a big deal changing your facial structure and it’s not something that you can just give up because you got bored or ask another practitioner to take on once it’s started. You will be in a 2 yr relationship with your dentist so you’d better like them!

He took CT scans of my head and neck and used a fancy computer program to work out all the angles and positions of my jaw and teeth and spine and how bad I was! Then his assistant took a huge amount of photos- for my before and after gallery!

I’m a huge medical nerd so I asked him for copies. The CT scans require proper equipment to read so I couldn’t get the full images but he was happy to give me the basic printout.

The photo on the left is a preferred profile for jaw length and teeth angle and I’m the one on the right. As you can see my upper teeth are so upright that they stop my lower jaw coming forward enough.

So the idea was the we were going to use a plate in my upper jaw/mouth to expand my upper jaw and then give room for the lower jaw to come forward. In theory this give my lower jaw more space and keep my tongue from blocking my airways and allow my neck and head to sit in a balanced position.

Of course i’m not a dentist so i’m sure there are more technical terms for it but that was the gist of it!

The other areas of problem that he was hoping to gain relief from were also my sinus breathing- by bringing the upper palate forward I would allow more room for my sinuses and there may be a possibility of then opening up my compressed tear duct again. He did admit that was purely a guess at this point but he was very keen to find out if it did work!

The other huge bonus for me was that it would lift and stretch my face forward so that my cheekbones would be more prominent, my nose slightly smaller in comparison and my wrinkles would be smoothed out. Show me a 45 yr old who doesn’t want that to happen???!!

That seemed like a good reason to drop $10K on it then and there!!

I’m actually not doing this for vanity but I openly admit that a bit of a face lift along the way is a great incentive to follow it through. I had a look at lots of pictures on ‘orthodontic facelift ‘ sites and my inner weeping 12 yr old stopped crying. Even my brother did comment after looking at the before and after photos on the sites that he had no idea why but everyone seemed more attractive at the end!

I signed up for the production of the plate and went to pay was delighted to find that my health fund did cover the initial bill of nearly $1000. So for the first time in my life I came away from the dentist looking forward to going to my next appointment- The Spacers.