8 more days

Until my first official ortho appointment – I’m not counting the first trip in that resulting in clipping off the wires on both back bottom teeth.  THIS appointment will actually produce results!  I’m getting a new wire!  Woo-hoo!  (OK, I’m sure I’m the only one that finds that exciting).   In the mean time, my teeth have gone from perfectly happy to horribly sore over the past 3 or so days.  Today I had to use wax even, ‘because my cheeks are screaming bloody murder on both upper sides.  Eek.  Must be moving again. 

I’m going to see if we can establish any provisional timeline for my treatment while I’m at the ortho, based on my progress so far.  I didn’t bother asking at the bonding…  My dear husband keeps telling me that my teeth have shifted noticeably, but of course I just see the crooked teeth still.  

In other news, my Girl Scout cookies have not yet arrived, so I haven’t had a chance to experiment with those yet.  I will probably get them next Thursday after my appointment!  Figures, but that’s when I usually see the mom that I ordered them from, so it would only make sense…  Hopefully the new pain from the changed arch wire won’t kick in until the next day and I’ll be able to enjoy a couple of hours of cookie goodness.  

Ooh, I bought some new eye makeup the other day – some silvery gray shadow and a new “steel” eye pencil…and now my eyes match my teeth! :P  Great…

 

mmm...toast

I have been avoiding toast because I figured it would be too crunchy.  If I can’t bite into bread crust, surely toasted bread would be worse, right?  Nope!  Phew!  I love toasted bread, especially toasted locally-baked sourdough bread with a healthy smear of butter… and it likes me!  Toasting it made it easier to eat, to my pleasant surprise.  Yea! 

 

And now on to my Paranoid Orthodontic Fear of the Week:  does any one have any issues when eating Girl Scout Cookies?  I ordered several boxes without even thinking about the fact that I was getting braces, and I know they will be delivered soon.  Finding out that I can’t eat them is likely to cause a bigger meltdown that the thought of going without Valentine’s Day chocolates…  I don’t normally eat a lot of cookies or other junk food (and I don’t consider chocolate a junk food – I’m thinking more like baked treats and other packaged crap, not chocolate).  Oreos in particular occurred to me as a real no-no for braces.  Just look at what they do to unadorned teeth!  So my concern is whether Thin Mints and Tagalongs will cause the same problems…  I sincerely hope not.  If I must, I will just indulge privately where no one can see the mess they create! J

 

I realized the other day that it’s been a good six weeks since I said I’d post photos of myself with the new bling…and I’ve totally spaced on it!  I got some pics back from our belly dance troupe photographer last night.  We had a “hafla” this weekend (a belly dance party) and she took some pictures of me dancing.  Ugh.  Not only did the light totally wash me out, but The Braces do NOT photograph well.  If I could get any less photogenic, they could use my picture to scare mice away…  BUT, for you my braces friends, and for the sake of being a total masochist, I will try to remember to post the least bad of these, as well as the ones I took when I first got bonded, just as soon as I’m home for more than 5 minutes…

Holiday-schmoliday

I’m at work today.  It’s technically a government holiday (President’s Day) and I normally get this day off since I would at a government facility.  But, I’m at work.  What the heck does this have to do with braces, you ask?  Well, in planning for a Mexican vacation this summer and the estimated time for recovery I’ll need for my jaw surgery, I’ve determined that I’m going to need more PTO and vacation days that I currently have saved up.  Soooo…I’m probably going to be at work for the remaining holidays this year, or at least as many of them as I can stomach.  My company is great in that if you don’t use the holiday on the designated day, you can save it for later.  And if I wanted to, I could work an extra hour each day for the rest of this pay period and add a second extra day to my PTO bank.  Hmmm…nah.

 

I thought it was hard to get up on regular Monday mornings…but trying to drag myself out of bed on a Monday that I’m not supposed to work was much harder! J  At least it’s nice and quiet in my office today…  

 

If I’d stayed home today, I could have caught up on some serious blog-reading time.  I’m such a slacker.  But blogs are now blocked from my work, so that favorite of lunchtime and coffee-break hobbies of mine is no more…  Hopefully I’ll get caught up soon – I’m dying to see what the rest of you are up too.  Oh, well – Happy President’s Day, y’all!

Not so sweet...

I cried and cried yesterday.  I’m a total chocoholic – it’s a disease people! – and my sweet husband knows this.  He’s an enabler. J  He buys me the biggest box of chocolates he can find every year for Valentine’s Day.  This year he was careful to get one free of nuts – mostly crème-filleds…and alas, many of them are still to sticky for me to eat.  I was crushed.  Talk about a V-day bummer!

 

It’s going to be OK, though.  I’m going to eat them anyway.

 

I hope everyone had a happy Valentine’s Day…

 

I dream of toothpaste...

Does anyone else have dreams about brushing their teeth?  I have yet to dream about my braces (which I find odd) but in my dreams lately, I’m constantly stopping to brush or floss!  This can’t be normal… :-#

 

Snip snip snip

Well, my errant archwire did not stay in place after Saturday’s little episode, so I left a message with Dr. W.’s office and scored a mid-afternoon appointment today.  The OA glanced at my wire and decided that the only solution was just to clip the back-most sections until I am ready for a heavier gauge – at this point, the back brackets aren’t doing much anyway.  She also thankfully snipped the bit of wire on the top back bracket that has started to poke my cheek.  Phew!  I have a nice-sized sore there from a week’s worth of scratching and poking.  The OA comments that my teeth have moved quite a bit in this first month, so that’s good news!  In 4 weeks, I’ll head back in for a heavier wire, but until then, I’ve got these two bare spots between my first molars and my wisdom teeth*.  It feels deliciously nekkid and I’m anticipating an easier month of flossing since that’s were the majority of my food bits get stuck!  (Yes, eeewwwww…I know!)

 

*Can’t remember if I went over this bit of dental history before or not.  When I was 19 and first (1 of 3 times) considering braces, my dentist yanked out all of my second molars.  He decided that my wisdom teeth were coming in straight enough to keep and that rather than remove them, I should just get rid of the 2^nd molars and make room.  Huh.  Brilliant, right?  Nope!  My wisdom teeth did come in pretty straight, but not straight enough to NOT leave a gap between themselves and the 1^st molars big enough to fit half a bite of whatever I eat.  That’s right – instead of wisdom teeth, mine are smart-asses.   I think I look forward to closing these gaps more than any other improvement, at least comfort-wise.

 

Totally off-topic story:  since my ortho is all the way out by my house, I got to take a nice long break from work.  I stopped at our local wine store, where my husband and I are members of their Wine-of-the-Month Club, to pick up our Feb selection.  The nice old couple that runs the joint offered me a wine tasting (free samples of 4 weekly wines).  I declined, saying that I shouldn’t because I was heading back to work.  The old man laughed and suggested that if I was heading back to work, perhaps I should have TWO tastings instead!  Sigh…I guess wisdom does come with age… :-#  (And no, I did not partake before going back to work, don’t worry…but I certainly thought about it!)

A word to the wise...

At a big party, surrounded by the Beautiful People, avoid the SPINACH DIP.  It does not like braces.

There will be Braces

I've had my first orthodontic mishap.

Just as my sweetie and I were settling in to our seats for the nearly-3-hour flick "There Will Be Blood", I noticed that something felt...wrong.  A run of my tongue over my braces alerted me to the fact that the arch wire on the back left side was extra springy today - it was out of the bracket.  I willed myself to just leave it alone until we got home, but man did that make for a long movie!

Now, as far as I can tell, the offending bracket (on my back molar) doesn't have a "door" like the ones on the other teeth do (these are the Damon braces of course) - the wire just seems to slip underneath.  So...I managed to slip the wire back under and am hoping for the best.  If it doesn't come back out before Monday, I'll call it good, but if it does, I'm off to the ortho for a repair.  It doesn't feel exactly stable, but I'm kind of wondering if it did before or if I just never paid that much attention to it.

Of course, this is on my "good chewing side" (I'm a lefty), so this is already dimming my mood as we head out the door to a food-laden birthday party...  Grrr...

Anyone else have this problem with the back bracket?  Any advice would be appreciated!

Uneven

Hmmm…when I run my tongue across my top front teeth, it feels like my right front-most tooth (I don’t know tooth names yet) is now sitting lower than the left.  I suppose it was probably sticking out farther in front before, so when they both started to move back, it would be lower…  It just feels weird.  I’m not complaining – any movement is progress and I know that my bite will probably get even more f-ed up in the months to come.  

 

One thing I wish I’d done before the braces is to have bleached my teeth.  They’ve never been very white – I am a reformed smoker and I love my coffee.  With the metal brackets, they just look BAD.  Sigh…  I am planning to do some heavy-duty whitening after this whole ordeal.  I’d always figured “what is the point?” since they are so crooked, but now all I can see is everyone else’s pearly whites.

 

Another sign of progress – I have a tiny bit of wire poking out of the back on the left side – I don’t think it is enough to go in for a trim, but it is enough to scratch my tongue up when I mess with it…which I’m trying not to do…unsuccessfully!  I’m going to have some BAD habits before this is over!

 

Have a good weekend, all!