braces: month 2

Two months gone by, already!

• Eating: Pretty much eating whatever I can cut into small enough pieces to chew with my little molars. (Why? Read this.) Still craving crunchiness, but otherwise feels back to normal. it helps that I don’t eat much meat.
• Brushing/Flossing: Even flossing without the threader.
• Movement: It looks like my teeth are moving, since I see the spaces between the teeth, and occasionally feel discomfort in one or two teeth. But a couple of days ago, a telltale sign of movement poked my inner cheek. The wire had moved, and had stuck out beyond the bracket.
  The way the Damon Braces work, the wire is a material that wants to move back to its perfect arch shape, and that’s what moves the teeth. Since the wire sits in the brackets but isn’t attached to them, as my teeth move, the wire straightens out. And as it straightens out, it gets “longer” and starts heading out the end of the last bracket, and into my cheek. I hope to get this clipped off tomorrow.
• Wax On: Have a blob of wax stuck on the wire end. Does the trick, but would rather have the wire clipped altogether. Is the wax unhealthy in any way? I should investigate.
• Smile: No compunction about smiling full-metal these days.

Only ten months to go!

first 48 days

Actually, yesterday was my 48th day in braces, and it was quite uneventful braces-wise.  What a contract from the first 48 hours.

While I still can’t eat high-chewing factor foods, the braces impinge on my life so little now.  I even had dinner tonight with a friend whom I hadn’t seen since acquiring my metallic smile.  I guess I hadn’t even told her about them.  Just goes to show that we adjust pretty quickly to such changes.   Self-consciousness about braces is pretty much out the door these days.

sour smile

Yesterday, I was enjoying a lovely pot of pear caramel tea and a fresh chocolate-dipped scone at my fave tea place when, suddenly, dry mouth!

Yuck. A veritable bad braces moments. Was it the black tea? What the scone too dry? (Too sweet, more likely.) Probably a combination. Drinking plain water didn’t help.

Fortunately, some fresh lemon wedges came to rescue. Just squeezed them into my water. Aaaaah! Relief. (Better than resorting to artificial saliva. Who knew there was such a thing?)

Dr. Weil’s website suggests the lemon juice trick, too, and talks about other suggestions and causes (medical) for dry mouth.

ortho buttons –> mushy food

A regular reader (you know who you are!) recently brought up a good point:

“Why are you talking so much about eating mushy foods? Is your pain tolerance that low?”

Great questions. I guess I forgot to mention that my teeth don’t meet except on two half-molar sized points. This means I can’t bite and can barely gnaw; no pizza, no crunchy veggies, no biting into a cookie… you get the picture. This is why I’m longing for crunchy food.

Why this indignity? When I got the braces on, one of my top teeth hit a bracket on a bottom tooth. This is not a good thing; either my top tooth would get chipped, or I’d bite off the bottom bracket. So to keep them apart, I got two little globs of plastic stuff on bottom molars, to separate my teeth.

Take a look.

It’s a small blob in height:

And in width. Since I only have one on each side, ALL my chewing is one on the surface of one molar!

So, now you know. This explains my mushy food preference.
(Fortunately, this is not the plight of most braces wearers!)