The Braces Story

Well well, I broke my promise again about updating regularly. To make amends, here’s a little update from what has been happening lately.

I finally got in to meet my orthodontist for the first time today. It took 2 months to get an appointment with him, must be a really lucrative business to run! Anyway, I digress. This is probably a good guide for people who are interested in getting braces. I must remind my readers that I am in no way an expert in braces and this is merely what my experience has been thus far.

I know people will think I’m crazy in wanting braces, but I want it for a few reasons. Mainly being that I’ve got a unilateral cross bite, which is prominent on the right side and being a perfectionist, I didn’t like the fact that one side of my mouth has crowded teeth while the other is pretty much straight.

I had made this appointment 2 months ago and have another booked for a month away. So today’s visit involved providing my ortho with the OPG that I took, him taking my history of my teeth/dental records, taking a couple of impressions of my jaw and bite, taking photos of every angle imaginable.

First he looked at my teeth with the little mirrors that the dentist uses and looked around my mouth. He took a couple of measurements with a few menacing looking metal ruler things. From my meager knowledge of human jaw anatomy, I think he was taking the measurement between my top and bottom jaw and another measurement that I couldn’t quite make out.

He then took a piece of wax and I had to bite on it to to see how bad my bite is. After that, they took a few pictures of my smile, my side profile, my front profile and my teeth. I had to wear this really weird contraption that looks like a BBQ tong, only a bit more rounded. It was to keep my mouth open for pictures. I can only imagine I looked like an idiot with that contraption while the dentist took pictures of my smile and I can imagine that its going to be interesting cause that thing really stretched my lips. I can only imagine that when it comes to putting the brackets in as it’ll be quite painful after a long while.

Then, the dental assistant mixed up a composite for some moulds for the impressions of my upper and lower teeth. It feels quite gooey and its just slightly room temperature. The cool thing about this is that the powder is white, but mixed with some liquid, which makes it turn purple. Its then put into a weird machine which mixed it and poured into little bowl things which is then popped into my mouth and I had to bite into it to make impressions of my teeth. The really cool thing is that the stuff turns white once its set. And the most annoying part of it was the fact that the thing stuck to my teeth so it was a bit of tug of war to remove it from my jaw both times. Haha

That was the end of the consultation. Well, for this time anyway. I got given a referral to get a lateral cephalometry thing, which is like an X-Ray of the whole face to check for my jaws in relation to my face etc. Who knew there were so many parts to this thing! They definitely are very thorough. After that my orthodontist explained that my next appointment would involve him coming up with a treatment plan and outlining the best treatment option before proceeding. He told me with the preliminary consult, he couldn’t see any easy treatment for me. He explained that my right side of my lower jaw is a bit bigger than my left, which could have stemmed from my left side only growing from the caudal side or something along those lines. I wasn’t paying much attention after he said he couldn’t see an easy way to treat. I remember that he was saying that my upper jaw was underdeveloped and my teeth were actually quite far behind and my upper lip is a bit flat. From my basic anatomy of the human body, I know that the lower jaw is easier to fix and an over bite with space in the jaw is easier to fix than a slight overbite with the upper jaw being underdeveloped.

After that trip to the orthodontist, I made a trip to the Radiological Clinic to get my x-ray thing done. It was interesting cause it took less than 2 minutes and I was out of there. The waiting in the waiting room took the longest, I think I was there for a good 15-20 minutes just waiting for the girl to come back from lunch to snap the picture.

After that, its just a month’s wait for my next appointment with my orthodontist where he’ll write out and go through a treatment plan with me. I must say, he is a very nice and friendly guy, unlike all my dentists in Malaysia. I guess that’s why they are worth the fees they are charging. Expensive, but I know that I’ll get my money’s worth with the service.

I guess since this will be an ongoing thing, I’ll be updating about my trips to the orthodontist and we’ll have to see how things go from there. Its going to be an interesting journey!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 9:09 pm and is filed under General. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.