I Can Has Advil?

I had an orthodontist appointment today and horror of horrors, I now have to wear rubber bands. Most people don’t get the bands until closer to the end of the torture treatment but not me. I’m Miss Special Case apparently. Ten hours in and I can officially say this sucks.

However, it does have the unexpected upside of making me eat less. I’m hungry. But to eat, I’d have to take the bands off. And taking the bands off means that I have to put them back on. And that, my friends, takes a good long while. It’s a time commitment, especially on the right side, because I have to use my left hand to do it.

Someone remind me that I’ll have a pretty smile to go with my hot ass (courtesy of the personal trainer) when this is all said and done.

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Tongue Thruster

That sounds like the subject line of a spam email doesn’t it?

But no, I am a tongue thruster apparently and it’s doing no good to my braces. So after 33 years of swallowing my saliva, I am now charged with learning how to swallow without pushing my tongue against my teeth. It’s harder than it sounds, I assure you. But I must figure it out in the next five weeks before I go back to the orthodontist. Or else risk undoing the good that’s been done so far. And we are almost halfway there. So I have to protect the investment.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to swallow and not touch your tongue to your teeth? Fuck. My tongue is tired and I haven’t even been doing anything fun.

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Let’s Talk About Teeth, Baby

I know I shouldn’t be saying this out loud but I gotta brag on my girl.

She now has four molars, one on top and bottom on both sides. And we just discovered them.  As in, we had no idea she was teething.

Part of me feels bad for her that she went through it with no pain medication. But then I think if it had hurt her, she would have let us know and we would have discovered the teething and given her Motrin. The other part of me thinks my girl is a bad ass! She don’t need no stinkin’ pain medication.

I know you are probably wondering how I could not notice a teething baby. But she really doesn’t allow us to mess with her mouth too much. We can brush her teeth but she keeps her mouth shut pretty tightly.

Is it weird that she’s got molars before the teeth next to her front teeth? She started to get the two on top next to her front teeth and they’ve broken through the gum but they haven’t really come in. And the two next to her bottom front teeth are nowhere to be found. I hope she has those teeth.

And on a slightly unrelated note, I have to bitch about my damn braces. Besides drooling, food gets stuck in the brackets like crazy. Since it’s not polite to pick food out of your teeth at the table or generally in public, I have now twice sprained my tongue or something trying to get the food out as subtly as possible. How exactly does one treat a sprained tongue?

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Droolin’… Droolin’… Droolin’…

I bet you think, based on the title of this post, that this is about Bridget. You’d be wrong.

Ever since these flingin’ flangin’ braces went on my flingin’ flangin’ teeth (particularly the bottom ones) I have been drooling like the village idiot.

I first noticed the problem as I waited in the airport lounge for a flight to New York back in November. I felt like my mouth was shut as I looked down to read the book in my lap, but apparently it wasn’t because before I knew it, I had a wet spot on my shirt and drool on my chin.  It has happened several times since then. That’s to say nothing of how it happens almost every night as I try to go to sleep. And I don’t even want to talk about the number of times saliva has shot out of my mouth as I was talking.

Sexy, no?

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A New Diet Tool

I haven’t really written much about my braces because there hasn’t been much to tell. I haven’t had much issue with them after the initial getting acquainted stage. They hurt like hell for about a week and certain foods were off limits, but now I pretty much eat whatever. I don’t chew gum or eat a lot of sticky candy, but other than that, not much has changed.

Since I got them on at the end of June, I haven’t once had to have them tightened. This has annoyed Jake because he recalls excruciating visits to the orthodontist when he was a kid getting his braces tightened and adjusted or whatever they did to him. Not so much for me. Either the science of orthodontics has improved vastly in the last twenty years or I just have a different problem than he did. Every time I have gone in, the orthodontist simply looks at them, tells me he is happy with the progress (which in his defense, I can also see so I know he’s not blowing smoke) and just wants to wait a bit longer for more to happen.

Well, yesterday I guess enough stuff had happened. I got the spacers on my bottom teeth and will be getting the bottom braces next week. I had forgotten how awful those damn spacers are. They didn’t even bother me much yesterday after they were inserted in the afternoon. Not until last night when I took my first bite of dinner. I about jumped out of my skin, partly because the pain was bad, but mostly because it surprised me. For a moment I had absolutely no idea why all of a sudden my mouth felt like I’d been punched. And now the pain won’t stop. I took three advil before bed and it didn’t even put a dent in it. I tried to eat some cereal for breakfast this morning and it just hurt too badly to get very far. I guess I’m eating yogurt and jello until after the braces go on.

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And So It Begins

I have made the commitment to get braces. They go on next Thursday. I feel like such a teenager. I had the option to get the white/clear ones but to do that adds about $40 a month to the total, and since it’s really just cosmetic, I couldn’t justify it. I’ll try to wear my metal mouth with pride.

Yesterday was my appointment to get spacers in. God, that sucked, even if it only took 30 seconds. It’s sort of an ongoing suckage because my mouth has been in pain ever since, which is causing me headaches. And I have to fight the urge to run upstairs to floss because it feels like I have, well, like I have little blue bits of plastic between my two upper molars on both sides. Which I do.

I am sort of unsure how I feel about my orthodontist. It’s like a salon in there with multiple chairs lined up next to each other - so you really don’t have any privacy when they torturing you. And you can tell they just aren’t used to that many adult patients because they don’t ever want to tell me what’s going on. They just want to get started, but I hold them up with pesky questions about what and why and how long. I guess most 12 year olds don’t give a shit about what they are doing and why, but this is MY money (ok, well it’s Jake’s money but still…..) and I want to understand the point behind everything they do. I can tell it annoys them. I’d consider going to another orthodontist, but a) this is the one my dentist highly recommends, and b) I already shelled out money for impressions and x-rays and I honestly don’t want to have to do that again. It’ll be fine, I’m sure. I think I just need to win them over with my sunny personality. Then they’ll stop being annoyed at all my questions.

So here we go. I know I’ll be happy that I did this when it’s all over, and even happier when I’m old and my jaw isn’t killing me from years of being out of whack. But for now, I envision a lot of pain meds. Thank god I barely took any of the ones I got after having the baby - I have plenty of leftovers. And now I’m going upstairs to practice a closed-mouth smile. I’ll be needing it for the next two years.

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