Journey of becoming a metal-mouth girl

My deceiving teeth. Looks tidy but actually it is not.

  I have no problem with my teeth when i was young. But I have a bad habit of sucking thumb until the age of *secret*. So that's when the problem arises when I'm a teenager, I can't bite with my front teeth, AT ALL. I've always been very conscious with how I look and smile with my teeth because I think I look hideous with it. Told my mum a million times about doing braces but she insisted that my teeth look fine and that I don't need a braces, but there comes my hero! My dad thought that my teeth is actually quite protruding so he agreed to let me have braces! Yeah cheers!

Let us have a closer look. Open Bite with misalignment of the middle line

  After the consultation with my orthodontist which consists of taking x-ray and mould, she told me the problem that I'm having is a anterior open bite. I always thought I'm having a buck teeth, but its actually a different thing with open bite. Buck teeth is a layman term of an overbite which is what orthodontist named them. The X-ray shows that the bone structure of my teeth is also part of the reason why I'm having an open bite, it's not entirely the faulty of my teeth, so that means an orthognathic surgery might be required to fix my bite entirely. Although it's a minor surgery but I still I have no guts to do that. Then she told me I can still fix it with braces only, but I'll have to wear retainer in the rest of my life. Sigh, so retainer it is! I still want a bright, straight pearly teeth and a nice smile with no space in between the bite!

The dreadful spacers

  During the next appointment, 8 separators, also known as spacers were placed between my molars. The spacers are used to make space to make the fitting of molar bands easier. Don't you look small at these little devils. They may look small and cute with their baby blue colour but trust me, this is the worst part of all. After placing the spacers, I felt a slight discomfort as I can feel the spacers pushing my teeth forward. After an hour or so, the true nightmare came. The feeling did not go away but turned worse after i ate. The feeling of having a piece of meat stuck between 8 gaps of teeth is unbearable. Plus when you eat, you can't bite properly as the spacers are between your upper and lower teeth and you can also feel your teeth bounce back when they touch each other LOL. Not exaggerating, but that's the power of the spacers.

  After suffering for one week, I had a second appointment with my ortho. She took off the spacers and guess what happened? She found out that one of the spacers is trapped in my gum. I know one spacer had gone missing but i didn't bother telling her because I thought i swallowed it when I was eating. That was super scary! Luckily she found out early. I can't imagine having a rubber buried inside my gum but god knows how long it get infected. So she use something sharp (idk what's that called) to dig and and prick it out from my gum (Ouch!). One of the most painful experience I've encountered! After all the pain she fitted on two molar bands at the bottom of my 1st molar and a nance holding arch on my upper 1st molar. She told me that it's to prevent my molars from going forward. This is how a nance holding arch looks like.

Photo credited to http://www.delightfulsmiles.com/

My mouth LOLL

The process of fitting molar band is quite tedious. She tried a few sizes of band onto my teeth and chose the best fitted as the molar bands will accompany me for few years. I'll have to bite on something like a stick several times per band to push it in. She then cemented the bands. It only takes like 10 minutes to settle everything and I'm good to go. In order to proceed with my braces treatment, I'll have to extract 4 teeth to make space for my teeth to move. After extracting all 4 teeth then only I can make appointment with her to bond up the brackets and stuff.

Molar bands on babe! More to go.

  The next post that I'm going to blog about, tooth extraction!