At Long Last

I waited 2 1/2 years. They did the surgery, the teeth slooowly moved, and finally, they were done. I got my braces off last Thursday, and have been grinning like fool ever since. My teeth actually still hurt (I guess they have to "settle" or something), and I'm wearing my super rad clear retainer at all times (except to eat), and now I talk kind of funny.

So here's the short story of my teeth.


My adult smile pre-braces. You can sort of tell that the canine teeth were tiny. July 2005.


January 2009. The day I got my braces. Ugh.


A few days later. This was my normal smile for a few months until I had the surgery that removed the baby teeth and put brackets on to the adult canine teeth that were buried under gums and bone.


I tried not to smile like this. I really didn't like the huge gaps in my mouth. July 2009.


So I learned to smile like this. This way you couldn't really even see my teeth. December 2009.


The day they came off. At long last.

Here's a close-up before and after. You can sort of see the difference.

The day I got my braces. January 2009. You can't even see the baby canines. Because they were so small, they hid behind the other teeth.


The day my braces came off!!! July 2011. Not quite perfect, but look at those adult canines!
(If you missed the awesome pictures of the inside of my mouth while the teeth moved, check this out.)


So, so happy. Yay.

Teeth That Move

Disclaimer: If you are easily grossed out by teeth or gums or saliva, this may not be the post for you to read. But it's really not very gnarly, I promise.

My teeth weren't really that crooked. A little, sure, but not so much that I would have decided to get braces on them when I was 25. But when I was in my early teens, the dentist looked at an x-ray and said that my adult canines had come in sideways and were basically stuck resting on top of the roots of my other adult teeth. There was no way they were going to do a 90 degree turn on their own. The problem was, baby teeth won't hold up much more than 35 or 40 years. It was inevitable that they were going to fall apart if I lived to see my 40th birthday. So I figured that I would probably need braces and procedures at some point, but we never got around to it during my high school years. Then came college and tuition, and no time for braces then. But then I finished college and got a real job. By this time I was married, and would have much preferred to spend thousands of dollars on a luxury vacation, or a decent car, even. But I didn't want my husband to have to kiss a partially toothless woman if we made it to our 40s. So, we made to decision to go ahead and spend the money and get 'er done.

This month we hit the two year mark since I've had the metal in my mouth. Here is the brief summary:
January 2009: Get braces. You can't even see the baby teeth with no brackets because they're hiding behind the teeth next to them.


June 2009: Have oral surgery to extract the baby teeth, then cut through the gums and bone, bond brackets on the buried canines, attach chains to the brackets, close the gums, then attach the ends of the chains to my braces.


Fall 2009, Winter 09/10, Spring 2010: Tension on the chains that are slowly getting shorter, but no other changes.


May 2010: One of the canines finally breaks through.

July 2010: Laser off some of my gums to retrieve a lost chain and give the slow tooth less resistance.


October 2010: Bond real brackets on to both teeth, and tie them in!


January 2011: Take off the silver brackets and bond ceramic brackets, and tie them in!



Here is another shot from yesterday. My jaw is crooked, so my bottom teeth will always look like they're sliding to my left. Oh well. But look at those beautiful canines! So maybe they underestimated the guess of two years, but at least we're making progress. Maybe another 6 months?