Today was Not Fun. I had a fully booked client list and knew that speaking was going to be a problem, so I waxed up and tried my best to pretend it was all not happening. The main problem was the lisp- I had no idea so many of my regular ‘work words’ have a sssss sound in them! After trying to say “astigmatism” for the 211th time that day by the time the last client asked me to repeat it I just wrote it down on a card and said “google it!”

It’s bad enough having a plummy English accent in a foreign country but now I have a speech impediment as well.  I didn’t answer the phone all day- the clients would have mistaken me for an overseas call centre!

After a few hours I was getting the hang of where to put my tongue to achieve the best combination of sounds but after eating at lunch and then speaking all day my cheeks were so chopped up from the movement that my lisp got worse again as I tried to keep from hurting myself more.

After work I had drinks and dinner with a few friends and that helped. I ended up putting lots of ice into my wine glass and the combination of alcohol and ice was actually quite pleasant and I forgot about the whole thing for a while. That was until we went for dinner. My friends very nicely allowed me to chose the restaurant due to my teeth pain so I decided on Thai food since at least I could have a curry sauce and rice! The food was great as always but it was such a miserable experience with everything getting stuck everywhere as well as the wax coming off the brackets and exposing my sore cheeks to the spices in the food. My previously braced friend turned to me with an air of understanding and asked ” Have you cried while eating yet?” and I was seriously considering it as an option about that point but reminded myself that I did this to myself and it was a bit of a First World Problem and at least I had food on my plate at all!

Going to bed at the end of the day was certainly the best bit, just knowing that I can spend 8 hours unconscious while my cheeks have a chance to recuperate and I don’t have to think about the appliance at all.

Tomorrow I have a day off so am planning to spend it in silence and eat smoothies.

I don’t really notice it as long as i’m not talking, eating, smiling, swallowing, sneezing, coughing, drinking, moving around or trying to sleep.

My teeth now don’t meet at the back very well so eating is a very slow process of cutting up the food to tiny bits and then kinda chomping up and down with my jaws to smoosh it into mush so i can swallow it. It just takes time but since my teeth haven’t started moving yet my jaws are not painful so I can still eat something! The worse part is my gums; they are just getting shredded from rubbing on the brackets. The wax helps a lot with general activities but when I eat it comes off and I end up chewing lumps of wax and the brackets become exposed. I’m just waiting for the time when my mouth toughens up and it’s not so raw but that will take a few weeks yet.

Speaking is a bit odd but again the wax helps my lips slide over the brackets better and I’m learning how to produce sounds again but I have to go back to work today and i’m dreading it. I’ve heard that practice makes perfect so by the end of the day I might be understandable but my gums will be in pieces. I’m looking forward to the wine after work already.

I’m basically still at the ‘new’ stage and nothing has really kicked in yet but I know that it’s all coming soon. It just all feels HUGE in my mouth but when I look in the mirror it’s not to bad, just looks like i’ve got gummy teeth at the side as i’ve loaded up the metal with wax.

Today was the beginning of my new teeth and I had an early appointment so i could just get things over and done with! I was more interested in getting the spacers out than anything else. I felt like the spacers were the “stopover” on international flights. While of course flying is uncomfortable, frustrating and the food is hard going at least you know when you are actually immobile in the seat the actual plane is going somewhere- you can watch the little animated flight path or see things moving very slowly out of the window but the stopover is a time waster. It’s just as frustrating and uncomfortable as the plane but you are going no-where. And that’s how felt about the Spacers!

My ortho struggled to even get the Spacers out as my teeth are so jammed in even the movement they had created was minimal. The taste was utterly gross. 2 weeks of unflossed food. I was heaving just at that.

He showed me the Appliance and did tell me what it was called but i’ve failed to remember since then but I just call it “The Rack” since it has a little screw system that he will turn and force my teeth apart. 

The whole process was not too bad. It was no scalp massage but it wasn’t actually painful, just pressure and sucking and sticking and slightly hammering (?) the thing into place. The worst part was when he cut the large wire from the centre of the appliance. He used a tiny angle grinder and he mentioned to his assistant that it would cut gums, teeth, and skin pretty fast so just always keep an eye on things. When he finished and the wire broke off i did whisper to him that I could have done without hearing that bit of information!

So it was in, and I was given another appointment time in 6 weeks to turn the Rack and was sent on my merry way as I had already paid upfront last time, with the receptionist promising me that it would feel totally normal in a week or two and since she was also wearing the same appliance I felt comforted by that.

Since it’s only a week to Christmas and I already had a car park space I went and did some shopping. Which was totally fine until I realised that I had no idea how to talk! Australia, and more so in regional areas, generally is a talkative nation and the Uk custom of pretending that shop assistants don’t exist and keeping your eyes facing the floor is considered very poor form. So every shop was a new round of “Hello/How you going ( bad grammar we know but that’s how it is!) /G’day/Can I help you? And all expecting an answer. So I stuttered and lisped and spat my way through various encounters and realised that tomorrow I have 8 hours of clients and I could barely utter a simple ” Fine thanks”

Time to practice and talk to the cat all afternoon. I’m sure she’ll understand.

Well, i’ve had the spacers in for 2 weeks now and i’ve managed to not have a tantrum and rip them all out with pliers and so they are still surviving between my teeth. There’s no pain anymore, so I assume my teeth have moved and found their now ‘home’ for now but they are just still deeply frustrating when eating; I just never feel like i’ve finished my food.

Tomorrow begins the journey for my new face, and the expansion plate goes in. I’ve taken lots of ‘before’ photographs which I will use to compare the changes week by week but I won’t ever look in the mirror and see quite the same face again. Which in many ways i’m happy about since the whole point of this process is to change my jawline so that I can breathe better and bite better and give me my chin back, but I’ve had this face for 45 yrs now and it’s a bit odd to know that it will never be the same again. Love it or hate it your face is yours and yours only!

So I officially say “Goodbye” to my old face and I hope I like the new one!

I will post photos as I go along but out of context I just look like some random fair haired middle aged person with a gummy smile! ( if you look close enough you can see the spacers in there!)

The original ‘before’ photo.

It does feel like time has slowed down waiting for these 2 weeks to pass and get back to the dentist to have my plate fitted. I just want to get it started! I’m getting used to the spacers now, they really only bug me after i’ve finished my food and i’m constantly thinking i’ve still something  stuck in my teeth. I think that’s a sensation i’m going to have to get used to for the next 2 years…..

One thing I have observed is how many other people i’ve noticed in Braces! I work in a public job and see and talk to people all day but this week i’ve really noticed everyone’s teeth! I never took much notice of teeth before unless they were obviously missing or someone had lipstick colouring them but this week i’ve become some sort of Jaw Monitor. It’s actually been quite distracting but I’m really seeing how many people have terrible teeth!! I’ve also noticed all the people about with braces, and how many adults are actually going through this process. There’s quite a few, but they tend to be quietly keeping their mouth shut!

It does make me feel better that i’m actually doing something proactive about my teeth now, and I can see when i’m dealing with clients how the shape of the face and posture of the neck is attributed to their jawline and teeth placement and I want to offer them my orthodontist’s card!

Bring on the Braces…

I’ve got used to them a bit, and the pain has lessened when i’m eating, though i’m still only on the spag bol or pasta type dishes. I’ve told most people I meet what is going on with my mouth in case they mistake the black inserts for poor dental hygiene!

They are on the bottom teeth too but I figured one picture was enough!

It’s been better today. I’ve just avoided foods that need chewing and most of the time I try to find ways to occupy my brain so that I don’t think about my teeth. I do get waves of claustrophobia with having something filling my mouth and have a moment when I can feel panic rising and I want to rip everything out but it doesn’t last long and I can breathe through that.

I am hungry but the idea of chewing anything just puts me off eating. I can see this would be an excellent weight loss program if that was something you needed to use!

I believe that the pain will subside in a few days and am hoping that the rest of these 2 weeks will just get easier and I will forget all about them. I hope so- this is only the first tiny step in a very long process and if it’s like this the whole way I wonder about not losing my temper at some point! Though I’ll certainly lose weight….

Initially apart from being a bit annoying I didn’t find the spacers too much of a problem. I couldn’t wear my night splints as they wouldn’t fit over everything but I had dinner on the first day as normal and figured I’d just get used to the ‘stuck food’ sensation in a few days..I’d just have to work out which bits were the spacers and which bits were actually food stuck in my teeth and make sure I didn’t pick the wrong bits out.

I woke up on day two with my jaw aching but just ignored it and went to work, and again apart from occasionally finding myself subconsciously trying to  dislodge the ‘food’ in my teeth I didn’t think about them much- I was too busy at work and that took my mind off it. And then lunchtime came around..

OUCH! I my teeth were so tender that biting down on anything was awful. I had to kind of mash the food between my jaws and squish it with my tongue and then swallow it. It took over 30 mins to eat a supermarket spag bol ready meal for one! I then tried to eat a chewy mint as a breath freshener but that was just beyond me. I spat it out and used mouthwash instead!

Taking a paracetamol eased off the aching from lunch and the rest of the day was fine.

Dinner time was a disaster. I went out for Thai food and I had no idea how hard some foods are!! Carrots and beans were just agony to chew so I stuck to the rice and curry sauce. There were a few wisecracks around the table at my expense and my friends said they would club together to buy me a NutriBullet for Christmas, but I was just actually trying not to cry from the frustration of not being able to eat!

Again I told myself to suck it up and reminded the 12 yr old inside of me that I had paid for this and that this phase would not last forever.

I came home and just went to bed as sleeping seemed like a good way to make time go faster and perhaps tomorrow would be less painful!

After my initial appointment I went back for the  start of the real work- The Spacers..  These are little rubber rings that are inserted between the teeth where the permanent plate will sit. But because the teeth are already so crowded there is no way the metal bands of the plate will fit between them so the spacers are used to move the teeth apart a little to get the appliance in.

Really having them inserted is not much worse that flossing very hard. Of course most people having work done like this will have crowded teeth so it does mean that it’s pretty hard to get the spacers in the non-existent gaps between the teeth but with enough force the dentist was able to push them in. It didn’t really hurt much but I was seeing stars for a moment! I was a little woozy after i stood up but it lasted only a second or two. It was just a lot of force to your jaw and you have to brace against it.

They feel like bits of food stuck between your teeth and it’s really annoying! I kept trying to eject them with my tongue and i had to force myself to stop fiddling or wanting to pick them out with my fingernails!

They are at the back and sides of my mouth but they are black! Why are they not tooth coloured? It looks like you have huge bits of spinach stuck in your molars, and of course no-one really sees there but if you laugh or crack a big smile then they do look ugly. I reminded myself that it was only for 2 weeks and to stop being a baby and ignore them.

Easier said than done…..

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.