Skip to main content

Smile!

I'm getting braces. In three weeks. For non-cosmetic reasons.  For the past 20 years, I've been destroying my front teeth, slowly but surely wearing them down with every chomp and utterance. It's now time to fork over massive quantities of cash to get this fixed or else they are going to die and I will have 6 (6!) dead teeth in the front of my mouth.  Not good for anyone, but especially not for someone who works on speech for a living.

The problems:

  • I have a huge overbite! Duh. 
  • My front teeth actually point inward. I had no idea. 
  • Severe overcrowding on the bottom despite having 3 teeth removed when I was a kid. The only reason I don't have severe overcrowding on the top is bc I had 4 teeth removed, including both my canines.  I guess they tamed me early. 
  • Severe wear on my front teeth, uppers and lowers, thanks to the front teeth grinding together inappropriately during my bite. 
  • My snaggletooth.  Spencer and I will no longer match in this respect. 
  • My gums.  Apparently they are all messed up. When I smile there is a lot of top gum, and that's bc my teeth have continued to descend as I've worn them down and the gums come with. Gross, right?  And my crazy teeth on the bottom that are so low have almost no gum underneath so I might need a graft.  Who knew they grafted gums?

The plan:

  • Immediately (2 weeks from now) 
    • 11/6/2014 - Bite props to make space so that they can put the braces on my teeth at all.  Otherwise my overbite is too bad.  This will create an enormous space between my front teeth. 
    • 11/6/2014 - Build-ups to fill in that gap so I can do things like eat, which I enjoy greatly.  Even so, for a while my mouth will feel very odd indeed. 
    • 11/6/2014 - New impressions. My teeth will be different, so new impressions are required. These go to the ortho so they can build my trays of braces. 
  • Slightly less immediately (3 weeks from now)
    • Braces go on!
  • The long haul
    • For 2 years I will have braces with wire adjustments about every 6 weeks. Also rubber bands to fix the overbite. 
    • They may have to pull a tooth on the bottom if they can't move stuff around enough.  It will be one of my front teeth because they are tiny and that's where I need the space, so I might have a gap for a while.  Which is really great if you are a speech pathologist and people look at your mouth all the time. Really. Great. 
    • Periodontal surgery. Again, this is possible. My upper gums might retract along with my teeth, but maybe not. And it may not travel up with that lower tooth, so I might need a graft.  Again, who knew this was a thing?
  • Finale (~2 years from now)
    • Braces off!
    • Crowns/veneers for the front teeth since they're so worn down. 
    • Retainers, probably a bonded one on the bottom
My face is going to cost more than my car, but for the first time in my life I'll have straight teeth.  Weird. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Land of Lost Things

I met my new therapist last week.  I test drove a few, and she was the one that stuck.  She seems like she's not going to let me get by with any bullshit, and she said a couple of things that zinged me in our very first meeting.  That was unexpected, delightful, and now, with time to think about it, terrifying. I've been doing so much soul searching lately, so much careful consideration of my life and where I am - you'd think I'd be finding myself, but instead I feel so completely lost.  A few reasons: 1. I sabotage relationships in a really predictable way.  I had always thought of this behavior in one way, but with one sentence, this woman last week made me question everything I thought about that.  It's good to question it; it's what I wanted, but to be confronted so quickly by something that I had never considered is frightening.  I've spent so much time trying to figure this stuff out, and it turns out that I've been so completely wrong about ...
6 comments
Read more

Series Finale

Life is not like Sex and the City, or Private Practice, or any other show where people in their late 20's / 30's / 40's are dating for our amusement. It's not fun. It's not glamorous. Relationships do not end with a lesson learned and a glass of wine. Okay, the wine is fairly accurate. The rest of it is crap. We watch those shows because of how inaccurate they are. We'd like to believe that after our latest heartbreak, we will recline in a bubble bath or in front of our computers, marveling at our newfound wisdom and patting ourselves on the back for becoming a more mature person. Let's for a moment apply this entirely artificial paradigm to my life. The basic ingredients are there: single woman in her distressingly late 20s, eligible-ish men, dates, alcohol, occasionally fabulous clothes. Hell, I've even got the klatch of cackling besties to tell me that the latest guy is unworthy of my distress. The basics are here. Things just don't see...
6 comments
Read more

2011 Reading Challenges

On the first day of this new year, I am pulling together the reading challenges in which I want to participate.  There are so many that sound interesting that I'm not doing, particularly a bunch of them that are regional authors, which I'm trying to cover with my Global Reading Challenge.  I've chosen a bunch of them, but the problem won't be reading quantity, but more like reading strategy.  I read 3 or 4 books a week and most of these challenges allow crossovers, so I see no problems reading enough books, merely reading the right books and then, perhaps more challenging, writing about them, which some challenges require, and some only suggest.  Either way, it's a neat way to prioritize reading for the coming year. The Challenges in Which I Shall Participate Southern Literature Challenge - I've never read enough Southern Lit, and while some of the newer stuff is truly awful, I'd like to explore some older books. It's any book set in the South by a S...
4 comments
Read more