I'm now six months into wearing my braces, and hope I'm not tempting fate by saying that I'm roughly half way through the process. I had my latest adjustment appointment in mid April, so apologies for being a little tardy with this blog post.
My appointment was at 8am (ouch!) and not realising quite how bad the traffic would be, or how full the car park would be, I was late arriving. I was whisked through promptly and had my usual chat with the orthodontist about how things had been going. I proudly said that the last six weeks had been the most trouble free to date, I'd had no clashing molars and no mouth ulcers. If only I'd known...
My top teeth are now all in the right place, and so the task now is to continue to pull my bottom teeth back to fill my extraction gaps. Looking at this time's photograph and last time's shows very little difference as everything is going on in the back of my mouth.
As I've had a molar removed, my remaining back molar has been doing a lot of work providing anchoring whilst my front teeth are pulled back. As a result it's tipped up slightly. The fix for this was to put brackets on my bottom wisdom teeth, to help straighten everything up. To be honest, this seemed like a great idea, my wisdom teeth are tucked away against my cheeks and I'm prone to catching my cheek with them, so pulling them out into a straight line made sense. Having been through bonding up six months earlier, I felt like a pro and lay there patiently whilst the brackets were applied. Wisdom teeth aren't apparently bonded up very often, and it was a struggle to get the brackets on with them being so tucked away. I then had a thicker wire fitted to my top teeth, this is the thickest wire I'll need, so this will just be replaced every six months now until treatment is over. My bottom teeth also got a thicker wire and power chain all the way round from wisdom tooth to wisdom tooth. I could feel the difference on both arches immediately.
I'm used to my teeth being sore for a couple of days after an adjustment. The additional pressure from the new brackets though meant it felt like I was back at the start of treatment. I was in pain for a couple of days, and couldn't eat anything hard for a week. It was demoralising feeling like I'd taken a backward step, but I guess the sooner my lower teeth straighten up and move back, the sooner I can get these brackets off, it's what's getting me through this process!
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