Saturday, August 9, 2014

April 2011-October 2011

After Invisalign treatment, followed by two years of part metal braces and elastics, things were at at interesting point.

The good: the gap from a missing molar down on the lower right? Gone. My ortho managed to lift it out of its sunken state and bring up to site with the other teeth.

The bad: it threw my bite out and I wasn't happy.

My ortho announced "he was done". I asked what that meant, and he said the braces need to come off and I'm all set. One way he suggested to get the bite in a better aligment was to grind some some erupted bits on some of my molars which he feared was throwing my bite out. At first I thought, hmm, OK, let's see. But then as he was grinding the first tooth I kind of freaked. This wasn't right. Cutting bits of tooth away to get a better bite was not what should happen. My ortho was really pissed off with me. I said I wanted to leave and come back another time for him to finish this grinding job. So I sat for a few weeks and went to see my dentist for an opinion on my bite. In polite words, he said I had no bite. I wish I had pictures of the bite because it was clear there wasn't one. My dentist agreed that grinding down teeth was not a good thing. He agreed it was good that I walked out.

So where to turn now? I decided to go see another ortho for another opinion. I was very nervous about doing this, but my current ortho had been so bad with communicating and explaining things to me, I had nothing to lose but to go see someone else. I went armed with my pictures and ortho history and had an interesting consultation. The ortho looked over my pictures, and looked in my mouth, and I could tell he was pretty horrified. He agreed I had no bite, and he was concerned about what had been happening to my teeth. Well, that was it, I broke down crying. I don't know where it came from, but I could not stop crying. I'm in my 40's and was crying like a toddler. I was so embarrassed! I think someone confirming what I had feared and dreaded overwhelmed me. The years of work on these teeth, and I still had no bite. Was I stuck like this forever?

Well, this amazing ortho made me cry even more because he said he would fix my bite and not charge for his time. I wasn't facing another $6,000 bill (the initial cost of my Invisalign back in 2005), and this person was not going to jump and make a ton of money out of me. He said he wanted to restore my faith in orthodontists. I think I cried on and off for the rest of the day unloading years of stress about my teeth.

May, 2011 I dumped my ortho. After seven years, I was the one DONE with him. He was mad, but I refused to speak with him. I moved to the new ortho and first thing he did was to take all the equipment out, and give me a whole summer of no braces. Freedom! No aligners. Nothing. It was bliss. This brings us to October 2011, with plans to go into full metal braces.

I feel bad about not having any pics for this stage, and I feel guilty about asking my ortho office to send me them seeing as I didn't essentially pay for them.

January 2009 - April 2011

**This may be a short post to cover two years of treatment, but I had other things going on and teeth blogging took a back seat. If there seems to be massive gaps in the explanations, please message and I'll try to fill you in.  

Around late 2008/early 2009
My wisdom teeth were not doing their job. They resisted Invisalign. I needed some dental treatment and snapped the x-rays from my dentist. What I saw horrified me. The erupted tooth was moving (somewhat), but the roots were firm.


Because the Invisalign revisions were essentially free, we decided to go for two more revisions. So that totaled my Invisalign treatment at 100 aligners for the upper set. 100 aligners. I'll let you sit there with that for a moment. Here was my bite after all of that, and I was somewhat happy with it. Now more goofy teeth! But bear in mind the back teeth roots are screwed at this point


May 2009
By May we ditched Invisalign. I needed these molar roots to move, and I needed something to happen. I moved over to metal on the back teeth only with various stages of elastics and the most HIDEOUS metal bar in the roof of my mouth. I think I went home and cried. OK, in the grand scheme of things it was just teeth, but really? I now have to have this in my mouth?? I made a lovely indentation in my tongue, too. It looks quite innocent in the picture, but it was pure hell before I got used to it.


The lower metal bar just wrapped around the inside edge of my lower teeth. My ortho also cut down my last set of aligners to use as retainers for the front teeth so I had those to clean, plus flossing and messing around with metal at the back. I wore this set up for almost two years which takes us to April 2011.

Bear with me

I'm going to fill in the gaps on my treatment. This weekend. All of it. I know some of you are keen to see what happened, and to be honest I've forgotten some of it, and that serves me right for not keeping up with this blog. I took some pictures along the way, but there will be big jumps. Here we go...