We are losing teeth like crazy in our house right now. Once Carter starts to feel a tooth even remotely loose, he's working that thing left and right to get it out. Now that he knows MONEY is involved, why wait for the tooth to fall out on its own? Right?
I know, let's all go ahead and sing the "All I want for Christmas....." song, just to get it out of our systems. Done? Good. He has two more teeth loose on the bottom. Not sure how this kid is going to be able to eat Christmas dinner or goodies!
On the same day, I also lost a tooth. I finally asked the orthodontist what he was going to do about my bottom jaw, which had started to float out a little bit from all the straightening. This has created a little bit of an open bite, with an accompanying lisp. Very small, no one but me really notices it. Not sure how he didn't anticipate this quite a while back, but hey, let's not pretend I'm the orthodontist here. I had two options - live with the lisp forever. Ok, that wasn't ever an option. Second option was to remove a bottom front tooth to create enough room to pull the teeth back in to where they need to be. NOT what I wanted to hear. This process has been worst case scenario from the get-go. The very last thing I wanted to do was have yet another procedure done. But that's what happened. We did more impressions of my teeth and decided tooth #25 was coming out. Another gap, front and center, to close up. Because the first one just wasn't fun enough.
Before and after:
As you can see, I will now have an odd number of teeth on the bottom. Fortunately for me, I suppose, I have full lips, so you don't even see my bottom teeth when I talk or smile. So, unless I literally point out to someone that I have one less tooth on the bottom (after the gap closes, of course), no one will ever know. They will be straight, that's all that matters.
The pain level with this procedure actually rivals the big surgery back in May, due to one big change. Back in May, and this summer when we were closing the gap, I only had chain anchors on the two top front teeth. Right now, I have chain anchors on every single bottom tooth, molars included. So we are doing some major movement right now, which makes the pain intense. Enough to keep me awake the other night, and trust me, nothing interrupts my sleep. Work has been interesting because the pain has made me incredibly grouchy. I have been trying to keep my office door closed so I don't have to interact with other people. Of course, I still get asked "does it hurt to talk?" Yes, yes it does. And they proceed to sit down and talk to me. Awesome, guys. Thanks.
So here we are, closing yet another gap. This one is smaller than the one from this summer, so I really don't think it's going to take that long. And this time, I really hope this is the last ball of fun for the braces adventure. The "adventure" is quickly evolving into what I would call a "shit storm" and I'm not too thrilled.
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