Off I went to work the next day with my new teeth. Completely pointless. $11k of dentistry hidden behind a bloody covid-19 mask!

At some point in the afternoon I took the mask off and had a look at my teeth. THEY’VE MOVED ALREADY! SHITE! I have gaps coming up at the front!

I freaked out and called the dentist and the lovely receptionist patiently told me that was why I had an appointment today for my retainer; as my teeth will move very fast If I don’t wear it! I figured this wasn’t the first time someone had rung up 24 hours later in a fluster……

I thought I was finished. They had wired up the back of some of my teeth and I was aware of the “Wear your Retainer” dogma that everyone tells teenagers but I thought retainers were those funny pink things with metal doodads. I still have my own teenage one. But clearly this is now 2020 and not 1982. And clearly it’s not the NHS paying for it either!

I now have clear little teeth guards that I have to wear as much as possible. Wearing them is no hassle, in fact I put them in and it felt slightly and un-nervingly reassuring. I felt like I had my braces back on and it wasn’t a bad feeling!

If my teeth do move even with the retainer they are going to reassess and perhaps put more permanent wires in the top part of my mouth too but they will see mw in 6 weeks and go from there.

You can’t really see them, I don’t really notice them, I can take them out for eating but I have to wear them as much as I can for a long time and then at night for the rest of my life.

After 2.5 yrs of being metal mouth and $11k?

Yeah, I can live with that.

After I walked out of the dentist I just went home. I had seen myself in the dentist’s mirror and didn’t really see a big change and my lips mouth still felt like the braces were there so I was a little underwhelmed by the time I got in the car. My rearview mirror has dropped off at the moment ( could we not mention that to the RTA please!) so I couldn’t even see myself in the car.

I drove home and went to find my partner and gave him a big smile- He just said “Wow! you have big teeth!”

“Really? do I?” So I went look in the mirror. HOLY MOLEY!!!! I’M ALL TEETH!!

When I smile I have a huge set of white American style choppers, I look like a ABC News Anchor!

The dental mirror must have just been a rubbish mirror! Every time I walked passed a mirror I’d do a double take! It just wasn’t “me” !

So as promised; here are the before and after photos.

I was so nervous about seeing  the Ortho today; what if he’d changed his mind and forgotten that he’d told me they would come off today!

But no, he had remembered. He did ask straightaway was there anything that I was not happy with and did I want anything more moved or changed? But I didn’t really know, I wasn’t sure really what the finished product was supposed to be like so I didn’t really have any benchmark, I just asked him if anything more needed to be done.

I was given the Offical Nod of Approval and decided they could come off. One of the nice things about the appointment was that the Dental assistant who had started with me many moons ago was working that day so she remembered me from many previous appointments and gave me gentle ribbing about it all which actually made it all very lighthearted and relaxed, so I appreciated her for that.

The orthodontist just pulled out the wires and elastics and then just literally took a pair of dental pliers to each tooth bracket and cracked them off. It really hurt for a tiny split second for each tooth, but it took less than a minute and the whole lot were gone. SO WEIRD!! of course all my teeth were still rough from the cement but they all felt so loose! You know those dreams you have when you feel that your teeth are falling out? Yep. that’s what it felt like. But awake.

They then took a big grinder/polisher thingy to all my teeth and cleaned all the cement off. A lot of people had told me that when the braces come off things feel slimy but I didn’t really feel that. In fact in many ways my mouth felt exactly the same and when I moved my lips it still felt like I had the braces in there. I realised the because of wearing them so long the inside of my mouth was totally scarred and numb and thickened and it still felt like I had ‘thick’ lips!

I had a lower tooth capped, where it had chipped off 20 yrs ago and then they did lots of photos for their “Before and After” album. Then they did impressions of my new teeth for my retainers to be made but by that time I’d kinda tuned out to what was going on, I just kinda lay there and let them do things!

I did have a look in the little mirror above me but nothing really looked that different. The mirror just showed me with just ‘teeth’ rather than metal reflections and I was a little disappointed. I was hoping for a big Reveal and I just didn’t see that which was a bit of anticlimax but after being told to come back the next day to collect my retainer I was let out into the world.

I am no longer a Middle Aged Lady with Braces.