Awhile back, I submitted my braces transition video to a YouTube contest hosted by Wild Smiles brackets. They just released the results, and I won!
Yay! Go me! Also, yay for my awesome dentist! 
I’m de-braced and re-tainered! Yes, yes, I know that I’d previously mentioned a delay to May 20th. But, my dentist, once the retainer came in and all was well, arranged to stay late today so that we could go ahead and deband me.
Next steps: Follow-up appointment in a few weeks to make sure the retainer is doing its job, followed shortly thereafter by a whitening treatment just to finish things up beautifully.
Here’s my retainer:
Here’s a before & after shot:
Here’s me wearing my retainer:
(As always, you can click each picture to make them larger.)
I have a wicked lisp now that is best described as reminiscent of either Stan’s older sister on South Park or Cindy Brady. I’ll be wearing the retainer 24-7 for awhile (except for eating and cleaning times). My teeth look so awesome. They also feel huge. Strangely though, even though my teeth feel huge, every time I look at my retainer, I’m amazed by how small it is.
My mouth is sore from the retainer right now, just from adjusting to having it there instead of the braces. There’s also a couple of edges on the back of the bottom retainer that my tongue catches on if I move it in a certain way. Overall though, it’s not bad…just something to adjust to, like the braces were. Oh, and it’s way easier than the braces were those first few days, for sure. It’s even less painful than the day after an adjustment. It’s just a new thingie to get used to having in my mouth.
Not getting braces off today after all. 
Dental office just called…retainer didn’t come in yesterday like it was supposed to. They called the lab to check on what had happened this morning, and it turns out that the lab shipped it yesterday instead of shipping it to *arrive* by yesterday as they were directed to do. So, there’s no retainer waiting on me.
And the dentist office was willing to stay late Thursday (when the retainer will arrive) or bring me in this Saturday…but I’m not available because of a (DH – excuse the rant, it’s emotion-fueled and temporary in nature) stupid trip for a stupid tournament that I stupid didn’t want to do to begin with and only got talked into because of stupid cool airplane and stupid cool friend who was going along but has since cancelled. And so, because the dentist office just moved and thus is booked solid (because they were unavailable for a week due to moving…hence it even being this long before my retainer day), the first slot I can get into is on May 20th.
The thing is…I’m sad. I’m not sad so much because I’m unhappy being in braces. I’m sad because I’d kind of built up today, and I’m annoyed because I’d really re-arranged work and a bunch of other things to be able to do this in a way that was relaxing and stuff…and now I have to do all of that again.
I had a braces appointment today, and we took impressions. I’ll have a retainer in a few weeks. The braces are staying on until the retainer is ready, to avoid any movement in the interim. Picking my last ever ligature colors was nostalgic. I ended up getting dark and light blue alternating, just for fun. The color combination seemed vernal to me.
My dentist showed me her lab’s designs for retainers, but she gave me the option of using this site’s designs, too, since I’d pointed them out to her. My dentist spoils me. Anyways, I looked at the ones from my dentist’s lab, and they were okay, but none of them really stood out to me. There was one with black-eyed susans that I kind of liked, and there was another that was a very generic pinwheel design using 3 colors that I liked. But, they had no cats, and I really wanted a cat. So, I’m going to get the boxy cat with dark green sparkly background from the linked site. The boxy cat is particularly awesome because it looks a little like Pancake.
May 6th is naked tooth day right now, but if an earlier appointment time becomes available, they’ll move me into an earlier slot. The date was out a bit because of their availability; they’re in the middle of a move to a new office which is making appointments tighter than normal.
Today is the six month anniversary of me getting braces. Original plan was that I’d be getting impressions done for my retainer next week, but there was a problem while we were at the NABC in Detroit. One of my brackets came off (making eight that I’ve had come off during this process), and because it was a tooth that was on a powerchain, the powerchain rapidly started closing the “gap” left by the tooth that was off the wire. Net of this was that I had a tooth being pushed behind the other teeth, right up front. I called it my redneck tooth while I was at the NABC. I have a really grainy (cellphone) photo of it that I took for the purposes of sending to my dentist, but it’s not clear enough to be of use to y’all, I think. Point being, I had a really obvious tooth that was sitting higher than all the others and was behind the others, for about a week. As soon as we got back, I saw my dentist, and they got that tooth engaged on the wire again tout suite. It hurt like bloody hell, but 3 ibuprofen later, I was at home and out like a light on the couch, so I only really felt it for the time that I was driving home. By the next day, you couldn’t tell that anything had ever been wrong.
Net of this is that, because we need to give those teeth time to re-settle, we moved my impression appointment out by a week. Even that is going to be a “let’s see where we are appointment”, because the whole issue caused some of the other teeth to move out of place, and we need everything to be happily settled before we do the retainer impressions. I may end up wearing them another month beyond that, just to make sure everything is copasetic. (By the way, copasetic can be legitimately spelled 3 ways, and my spellchecker in Wordpress recognizes none of them. It’s like the spellchecker is protesting.)
The wild part is that I had speculated from day 1 that my “six month” braces were actually going to be seven and a half month braces, because my teeth were so messed up. The truth is though that, if this bracket issue hadn’t occurred and if it hadn’t occurred at such an inopportune time, my six month braces would have lasted almost precisely six months. That’s pretty amazing, when you consider where I started.
If you want to re-live the fun, click the “braces” tag on this post to get a listing of all posts on this topic.
OMG my teeth hurt. The good news is that at today’s adjustment, my dentist confirmed that this is my last month in braces. My teeth are almost done. The last few things are really minor, to the point that if the braces were bugging me, she could take them off now, but since I don’t mind having them, there’s no point in rushing.
So, I will be getting them off right on time, basically at the six month mark. At my next appointment, they’ll take impressions of my teeth without the wires. Then, I’ll get my wires back on for about 2 weeks while the retainers are being made.
She also confirmed that I can get whatever pretty decorated style of retainer I want, which is awesome. The link isn’t actually to her lab but to a similar one that I found online; she’s getting me the catalog of the ones from her lab but she confirmed with them that whatever this lab can do, they can do, so that’s cool. I’m thinking that I’d like to try to get them to put my maneki neko on my retainer.
For now though, I wanted green for this month. I have powerchains again, and the green powerchains turn out to be really, really tight…meaning it took some serious yanking to put them in, so I’m really sore tonight. I’m consoling myself with pizza. Yes, dinner is pizza. Get in the kitchen.
I’m going in for an adjustment tomorrow, as well as a cleaning, so it seemed a good time for a braces update. Also, if you subscribe to “mytsukata” over at youtube, you’ll be able to see all of my braces videos, as well as any other videos I upload.
