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.

 

 

Not that I’m counting or anything……

I want these things GONE.

They don’t cause me direct pain anymore, and 90% of the time I don’t think about them at all.  But I feel the same about cold sores, and I don’t want them either.

I also am having a moment of apprehension. What happens if my teeth are not perfect when they come off? What if they are not ‘done/fixed/finished? If I need to have them for longer to do more changes then surely I’m best to suck it up and leave them on. It was $11K to do this and I’m NOT doing it again, so better the devil you know, right? I am no longer with the original Ortho that started this and so does the guy taking over from him really understand why I was doing it and know the benchmarks for the final result? I wonder if I’ll miss them? I won’t be the ‘Middle Aged Lady with Braces” anymore!

On the other hand if I go there and he tells me that I will have to wait another 6 weeks because there’s more to go I think I’ll explode!

Is this what Stockholm Syndrome feels like?

I’ll take some final photos if them on to have as a memory and then dance into the dentist this week and hopefully say goodbye to the torturous little devils.

 

 

Well thankfully here in Australia the covid thing has died down a lot. If I’m honest compared to other countries here in regional Australia it was never really a ‘thing’. We have a lot of space, few people and so social distancing is kinda how we roll. I have zero interest in spending time in shopping centres and because the sun shines every day we don’t all go mental to cram into public spaces every time the weather has a break in the drizzle so we’ve not all spread it to each other.  The dentist opened up again and so have the pubs- though they are not directly related. ( perhaps they should be?)

I have had to wear a mask at work, which actually is not a problem, it saves me from stressing about bad breath ( mine and the patients) and certainly means less bother after lunch and having to worry about spinach in my teeth.

Mental note to any of the Braced if they are wearing masks;

1; Don’t wear lipstick. The mask just smears it all over your face and if you have to take it off you will end up looking like the Joker on a bad day.

2: Don’t smile under the mask. You end up catching the brackets on the inside of the mask and it’s pretty odd trying to talk and unhitch yourself from the mask at the same time. Just smile with your eyes and keep your lips sealed.

Anyhoo, I finally got back to the Ortho after all this time and I’m officially DONE!

He’s re wired me for my final push and in 6 weeks time he promised me he will take them off.

HURRAH!!!!!!!!!!!

This will now be the longest 6 weeks of my life………

 

 

 

Well, that’s scuppered that idea. With the Covid-19 thing going on the ortho has shut. Until further notice.

So me and my nearly done teeth are going to have to remain living together whether I like it or not. Much like some of the flatmates i’ve had in the past.

I’ll be buried in these things at this rate.

 

 

 

 

 

My ortho retired, Dammit! I have been moved to another ortho who has taken over all the work. The nice thing about the new guy is that he also has a full set of braces so he does have a lot of empathy for how it all feels but it still doesn’t stop him from being a little heavy handed with the pliers. After he cut my gums with the tools a few times I had to tell him ” more ‘dentistry’ and less ‘fencing contractor’ please!” His nurse did give me a grin under her mask and I suspect there have been a few complaints about his lack of subtlety but no-one’s ever been so direct.

Ironically he’s very gentle with the adjustments. He only makes tiny adjustments and then off I go for weeks and nothing seems to happen. It seems to be taking forever to get anywhere and it’s been well over 2 years now so I asked him to just rack it up a bit! I know which teeth are supposed to be moving where, as I do ask questions and he tells me what the plan is but nothing is moving. I don’t even get any soreness even with a new adjustment so i’m thinking he’s just a slow and steady kinda guy. Either that or he gets paid per appointment but since i paid up front that doesn’t make sense! i just want the teeth to move and it all to be finished, I don’t care if it’s too sore to eat for a week! I was hoping to have them all off by now but it seems that I will just have to wait longer……

 

Well I really thought I wouldn’t be doing another Christmas lunch with these braces on but there you are…. Patience is a virtue i’m told.

As i said before, I don’t really notice them much, it’s only when I eat and then it’s a festival of left overs in my mouth. I’ve started carrying around toothpicks now so that I can try to get most of it out without having to dig about with my fingers in public but do feel a bit of a hick using them!

Apart from that they are just there. They are just part of me, like them or not.

Blimey, I had honestly forgotten about doing this blog and then I went to the Orthodontist for a racking and realised it’s been over a year since the last post.

What has changed? Honestly not much. The train tracks are still there and while I always notice them when i’m eating most of the time I don’t really think about them. I always heard people say that you get used to them and you don’t need to use wax anymore as your gums toughen up but it’s true. They are just part of my mouth now. That doesn’t mean I don’t hate them but my brain has sort of tuned them out.

Of course i’ve had the usual problems; one of the wires snapped and I swallowed it. So far i’ve not noticed it but one day when if I end up with a perforated colon i’m sure we’ll find it. One of the brackets kept coming open but I learned how to use a little pair of pliers to snap it closed again. Eventually the Ortho replaced it but it was no drama.

It’s been nearly 2 years now since i first started and I cannot lie and say the time has passed quickly but for the last year I’ve just accepted that’s what’s happening to my mouth. I think i’ve started being conscious of it all  now because I had the deadline of 2 years in my head and now that’s approaching I want them GONE!!

Well at least the pain has subsided and things feel kinda normal. As much as they do when you have metal lego blocks attached to every tooth in your head. Visually they don’t look great at my age but I know from experience that no-one really cares. I feel more self conscious from the inside more than others make me feel aware of it. As one person said when they look at me they just think  “Oh, she has braces” and that’s it. Nothing more. So i just accept that I have braces on my teeth and no-one cares. I’m very aware of when i’m eating that food gets stuck in them and make sure I find a mirror pretty quick to do a spinach test but overall having the braces on the outside of my teeth is actually better than the rack on the inside so I feel this next stage is a relief compared to the last stage!

Only one snag; since my teeth are overly far forward for the length of my lips at the moment and my jaw won’t close properly because of the brackets I can’t actually seal my mouth closed. Which means I can’t “eat with your mouth closed” as we were all taught as a child and I’m sleeping like a mouth breather at night and end up dribbling! So.Not. Cool.

I have an elderly cat that dribbles all the time when she’s being petted as she has lost most of her teeth and i’m starting to see her point.

I did talk to another lady who has braces if she was dribbling at night too and she told me that she had applied fake tan before she went to bed and woke up in the morning with a pale streak down her chin!!

Mental note to self; Apply fake tan in the morning.