Day 7: One Week Down! Progress Shot.

One week down, an infinite, indefinite number to go! I am still yet to ask my orthodontist how long my treatment will last for. I'm afraid of the answer! I also don't think he actually knows, since my jaw needs to be redone during the treatment and right now we are just waiting for my teeth to be in the right position for surgery.

Progress shot, 1 Week

And I won't deny you a progress shot. My canines are still quite high, of course, but I think they're slowly moving down. You can see the bracket on my left canine (the right in this photo) is snagging on my top lip. One thing that has really surprised me is the smooth edges of my two top front teeth! In my 'before' shots a bit further down you can see that before my braces were put on, my top front teeth still had those little bumps along them, like adult teeth do when they first grow through.

Let's see, what else... I should tell you what I've been eating, I guess.

• Lots of soup. It has been my main staple. And there are so many different kinds! I have been needing to blend it further but yesterday I managed to eat minestrone without blending it by jutting out my lower jaw so my back molars can touch and chewing (werewolf-like) on my left side. It was a bit gross but it worked.
• Icy poles. Sugar-free. Just something to make me feel like I'm eating, really.
• The middle of a garlic bread stick. No crust. Just pulling the soft, buttery pieces of bread away from the crust, sucking it a bit, gnawing on it as best I can and swallowing it. I felt like I was wasting so much bread so I've only done this once.
• Chocolate mousse. Sugar-free. Just a little treat to make me feel okay.

And really, that's all. The bigger and softer things are, the easier they are to chew. The smaller things sit in the gap (like macaroni cheese) and make it impossible to bite down on them, especially when there are lots of them, like rice. No matter how soft it is, it's the size that is really the important thing.

I've also lost a lot of weight, around 4kg. 

That's really all I can say about my first week! Doesn't hurt whatsoever, pressure has almost completely abided (only a touch of pressure on my bottom front teeth), and the inside of my mouth is fairing pretty well.

More updates soon!

<3

Day 5: A Small Vent

You know what the majority of people on this planet take for granted? Being able to chew.

Sounds pretty trivial, right? I mean, come on, chewing is not such a big deal, there are people dealing with far worse things than not being able to chew. Get over it.

WRONG. Chewing is now the number one item on my list of things that are important to be able to do. I am going insane. Like, I feel a bit crazy. This is the 11th day of my liquid/blended diet. It's not even a "soft food" diet. I can't even manage that. I even have to blend vegetable soup to a liquid.

Example of my bite with braces

Right, so this image attempts to show you the sheer impossibility of my teeth touching. It doesn't look anywhere near as bad as it is, it's definitely one of those things that need to be experienced to be fully understood. The gap that begins at the tooth to the left of my left top tooth (the right in this photo) extends to the far depths of my mouth. NO teeth actually touch each other. The closest that they get to touching is along the bottom row; as you can (hopefully) see - it was really hard to take this shot - my bottom front teeth overlap my top teeth as usual, but hit the two brackets on my top teeth that are unintentionally acting as a barrier. That gap, although only appearing to be a couple of millimetres, is the problem. Well, my underbite in general is the problem.

The kicker? COMPLETE LIQUID/BLENDED DIET FOR BETWEEN 6 - 12 MONTHS.

A year of this. How will I cope? I am literally hungry all of the time. I am falling behind with uni because my brain cannot concentrate and can only think of how hungry my body it is and constantly falls into daydreams about food.

So I hope that this photo and description clears a few things up. Moral of the story: The reason I cannot chew has nothing to do with any sort of pain. I am actually in almost zero pain apart from a very slight dull ache that does not warrant any pain relief. I have actually taken zero pain relief since having my braces put on - spacers were far worse.

No, the reason I cannot chew comes from the brackets preventing my usual bite/chewing motion from taking place.

My orthodontist doesn't seem to be concerned about this! He keeps talking about sacrifice and how we have to give a little to get a lot. And he's partly right, of course, and I would take this discomfort and actual starvation now in order to have a perfect smile in the future 100 times over if I had to.

BUT THAT'S THE THING, I am actually wasting away and I'm worried that I'll end up on a drip in hospital due to malnourishment/extreme weight loss.

Parting note: My wisdom tooth is now coming out two weeks today (Friday October 10, 2014). I work on Fridays and took today off work in preparation that it would be taken out yesterday, so there goes any sort of income. But the alternative was getting it out on October 28, and I have a uni exam on that day. So the 10th it is.

<3

Day 4: Dentists, Radiologists and Orthodontists

Just a quick post for today. I'm not going to be posting every day but when crucial things happen or I feel like procrastinating from uni, I will.

Today was important because I think it has been sort of a turning point for me. I can barely notice my braces anymore (I can feel the pressure still and a slight ache but they no longer feel foreign in my mouth), especially after my orthodontist managed to snip the wire that was shredding my mouth to pieces. Seriously, as soon as he snipped the wire, sweet relief literally flooded through me and the pain was gone! And my mouth hasn't bled at all today.

He also gave me permission to get my wisdom tooth out, so I managed to make an appointment with my dentist, who took one look and sent me to radiology, who took x-rays and sent me back. When my dentist looked at and showed me my x-rays he said that the abscess needs to be treated with antibiotics first, so he can actually get to the tooth. He also said that it was the abscess that was causing the pain, so once that was dealt with I wouldn't be bothered by my tooth, but eventually I will be, so he's taking it out on October 28th 2014 (in about four weeks). Until then, I'm on antibiotics. Blegh.

Also, last night I tried to blend spaghetti bolognese. I made actual bolognese, like, for a normal person, then blended it for me. It was a thick disgusting paste. Worst idea ever.

So the easiest thing I've found to do is to blend store-bought soups. I mean, you can make your own soups I guess (it'd be healthier), but remember that you are always hungry when you're on a liquid diet and you'll probably starve in the time it takes to prepare, cook and blend homemade soup. Or I'm just lazy.

Right, so I'm going to wrap it up there, just thought I'd fill you in. 

<3

Day 3: The Return of the Wisdom Tooth, Potato & Gravy and the Broken Bracket

Day 3... is that all? Feels more like Day 18,374.

No, it doesn't really, I'm just being grumpy. I'm actually in a butt-load of pain and this surprises me: aching teeth and jaw, ripped and blistered lips and the inside of my mouth is shredded and just will not stop bleeding. I know that it will all be worth it, but right now it is so very torturous.
So, back to my orthodontist tomorrow - they're not open today so I couldn't make an appointment, I'm just going to have to rock up there in the morning. I'm going to:

a) ask him if he can trim some of the metal/wire from the bracket on my bottom-left molar if possible,
b) find out roughly how long it will be until my bite shifts to a position that allow my teeth to touch so I can eat/chew solid food again (as this is officially Day 10 [including the week of spacers] that I have been on a liquid diet and my carnivorous self is yearning for meat - and it is also making me a bit sick),
c) direct his focus to the mother-flipping wisdom tooth that is indeed impacted and pushing through, giving me a very attractive, pea-sized, white-tinged abscess in the far bottom-left corner of my mouth (no photo of this one, guys - to paint a picture for you, you can see the liquid and pus swirling around in it... satisfied?),
d) get his permission (do I need it?) to go to the dentist and get him to remove said impacted and likely infected wisdom tooth ASAP, and
e) have him check out and hopefully fix the little piece of wire that has come loose from my bracket on the tooth that is next to (well, in my case, mostly behind... but should be next to) my top-right front tooth (I have no idea what the actual names for teeth are, but you get the gist). 

I don't even know if the wire on the bracket is broken, it's a funny sort of a tooth so maybe it's only supposed to be held on with one wire, who knows. But I'll get him to suss it out regardless.

Okay, so I know all you really want is a photo. This was taken last night (Day 2):

And that little tooth I was just talking about with the broken piece of wire, it's the one on the left side of my slightly crooked front tooth (the right side in this photo). See how it is very far behind my front tooth? So I don't know if it supposed to be like that or not, but anyway, I'll get it checked.

Also note my very puffy lips - ouch.

Right, the potato & gravy thing... I think I've mentioned like 200 times now about my underbite, and how braces completely disallow any of my top row of teeth to tough the bottoms, meaning I cannot chew full stop. So I started brainstorming a whole range of foods that I could eat. I have a reliable smoothie maker, so that's good (I even have to blend soup to pure liquid, to give you an idea). I have icy poles and frozen yogurt and normal yoghurt and then I went and made my own frozen yoghurt, which was inherently messy... and then I had an epiphany. KFC. Potato & gravy.

I know, I know. Saaaa healthy! And I also know that I could make my own potato and gravy and it may even be tastier as well as healthier. But when you are as hungry as I constantly am on this never-ending liquid diet (and the need to chew is a huge part of that), KFC potato & gravy is a wondrous option. So I went to KFC and I asked for 3 large tubs of the stuff, and it was one of those moments where everything sort of goes quiet before you speak, and because the background noise was loud before I was still in loud-speaking mode, so EVERYONE, staff and customer, stared at me like I'd gone crazy. The kid who served me decided on the spot that I was crazy and I very much enjoyed a diet of potato & gravy for the entirety of yesterday (and I have another tub left in the fridge for today... don't judge me).

Okay, a little note, if anybody reading this is going through any of what I am going through, keeping busy really helps with the pain or the uncomfortableness. It's hard to not focus on any pain with your teeth because it is so sickening and the dull ache it causes makes concentrating on any other task close to impossible, but if you can find an activity to do that preferably does not involve talking (unless, you know, you enjoy ripping the insides of your mouth to oblivion), you should do it.

And another little note on orthodontic wax: I am completely useless at putting this stuff on my brackets. The most important thing is to DRY the brackets before you put it on. Am I, like, a serial human salivator? Or is it because the bracket that needs the wax is at the back of my mouth, on my molar? Anyway, if you're going to try to dry your bracket, DO NOT use tissues or cotton buds (they get caught super easily on it). Paper towel might work, also a cloth of some sort.

All right, sorry for the extremely long post, I think I'm just trying to put off uni work.

<3

Day 1: Brace Yourself

Finally I have these chunky metal brackets crowding my mouth... and I couldn't be happier! It's a hard feeling to describe, but I guess it's because I am an adult and made this decision myself that I don't feel any form of regret. I feel sorry for teenagers who have this thrust upon them with little or no decision in the matter, but I'm sure they are all extremely pleased with the outcome, even if the time it took to reach it was torturous.

But first - an update on the wisdom tooth situation. Turns out that the answer was:

b) is getting tired of all of the pressure caused by the spacers

which is the best possible outcome! As soon as the spacer that was the culprit was removed, the pressure literally disappeared and the pain (for the most part) went with it.

Okay, now that's dealt with... Photo time! 

Relaxed mouth/speaking

I have an infinitely small mouth and so this photo demonstrates how much you can see of my braces when my mouth is relaxed or when I'm speaking.

Wide open mouth

This next photo shows the braces to a better extent... Cannot wait until my teeth are no longer this crooked! 

Closed mouth

And this photo shows what my mouth now looks like when I (attempt) to close it, which I can no longer do. This is as much as I can close my mouth, which means that none of my back teeth close together at all anymore and chewing is impossible. At the moment I'm trying to eat a lamb and barley soup... yeah nah. I know that as my mouth adjusts to the feeling of having twenty extra teeth, chewing will become easier.

It's all a waiting game!

<3

The War of the Spacers and the Wisdom Tooth

Well, in less than 24 hours I'll be sitting in my orthodontist's waiting room, hoping and praying that my braces will still be able to go. I'm beginning to have doubts as, ever since Friday evening, my bottom-left wisdom tooth 

a) wants to come through;
b) is getting tired of all of the pressure caused by the spacers, or;
c) all of the above.

As you can probably imagine, the level of pain is quite high (to put it mildly). I used to think that normal wisdom-tooth pain was bad, having had my bottom-right one removed earlier this year. Not anymore. This pain is at least twice as bad, causing me to wake up in tears in the middle of the night when my Nurofen Zavance wears off, and counting down the minutes to being able to take another Panadol Rapid.

Because of this pain, I'm basically unable to open my mouth at all. My only hope is that it is the spacers that are causing this immense discomfort and that the pain will go away when they're removed, shortly before my braces are to go on. My worst fear is that my braces appointment will be postponed and that my wisdom tooth will have to come out and heal before I can get them on. The surgeons are planning on removing the rest of my wisdom teeth during my maxillofacial jaw surgery regardless, so I know that they can be removed during my braces treatment (as they're doing the surgery with my braces on), but, if the pain is caused by the wisdom tooth pushing through on its own accord and not the spacers, I don't know if I'll be able to hold off until the operation even if my braces do go on tomorrow.

High levels of anxiety today! I'll keep you posted.
<3

Spacers: The first step

Ugh, spacers. Eight spacers, four on the top and four on the bottom. Little, purple, very thick, rubber things that are jammed between my teeth to "space" them out. Extremely uncomfortable but not as painful as it sounds, or as I thought. It's more just really irritating, it feels like I have eight extra teeth in my mouth that all have food stuck between them.

Bottom row spacers

The main issue with spacers that I'm finding is that the edges are pretty sharp and are scraping along the sides of my tongue, causing it to bleed and blister. When braces irritate the sides of your mouth you can get some wax to put on them to soften the contact, but with spacers you can't do anything about it.

The second issue is that chewing is not only difficult, but impossible. This is actually the fourth day out of seven that I have had my spacers in and I have only attempted to eat solid food once, which was melted pizza cheese (healthy, right?), and it was a very painful and frustrating disaster. If you have an overbite/cross-bite, it might not be so painful, but with an underbite, my teeth now do not touch at all because the spacers block them. If I pretend to chew, I can only feel my top spacers and my bottom spacers bouncing on each other. And because the surfaces of them are smooth (unlike the sharp sides that attack my tongue), food just gets gummed and not chewed. Also, any pressure on them at all is painful.

Speaking of pain though, they have never once been bad enough for me to actually have taken any sort of pain relief (my orthodontist recommended ibuprofen if I needed it, by the way) because I don't even attempt to put pressure on them by chewing at all. It really is just the annoyance of the sensation and living off smoothies for a week, which isn't so bad because I've lost 1.5kg.

I'm a little bit swollen, you can see in the photo below, taken the day after I got my spacers, that my jawline is a bit puffy and swollen as my teeth are moving further apart (but it really is not all that painful).

24 hours of spacers

In four days (Monday 22nd September 2014) I get my braces put on! I'm not worried about the pain because every ounce of it means that I am getting once step closer to beautiful, straight teeth.

<3

Underbite: 'Before' shots

It was immensely hard to not only take these photos, in my most physically uncomfortable state, but to also find the courage to post them for you to see, so I hope that it helps to paint a picture of my circumstances; The difficult thing about this is that everybody's situation is going to be different.

Closed mouth

This first image is the way I look if I were to close my mouth as if to chew, so that my top and bottom teeth are touching. You can see quite clearly that my underbite is fully established, and that the teeth in the bottom row are crowded, though fairly straight.

My two front teeth on the top row are slightly crooked, the teeth on either side of these are almost fully behind them and my canines are quite high. I also have a slight cant, which is when my mouth shows more teeth and/or gums on one side than the other; you can see that I kind of have a snarl on the left side of my mouth (the right side in this photo).

 Closed profile

This is the way I look in profile when I close my mouth as if to chew. You can see that there is actually no gap between my top row of teeth and my bottom row, and that they are all very crowded; I am having two teeth out midway through my braces treatment, and the rest of my wisdom teeth out (I have three left) during my maxillofacial surgery in four to six months. During the surgery they are mainly concentrating on moving my top jaw forward, so that my top row of teeth overlap my bottom row of teeth. It will be a very minimal shift, only a few millimetres, but an extensive surgery with a six month recovery period.

Open mouth

This last shot is how I look when I partly open my mouth, and usually I try to relax my mouth into a semi-open position (slightly less-exaggerated than this) behind my closed lips, so I don't have the 'bulldog' look about me. I know that my underbite is not as severe as many, as I have a normal chin. My lower jaw is in a fairly good position when viewed with the rest of my face, so it is just my top jaw that needs to be moved forward.

I'm really looking forward to posting many more 'progress' shots, and hopefully enjoying my new appearance. I've read all of these horror stories about people who hate the way that they look after they have braces and jaw surgery, but my orthodontist has assured me that we will get fantastic results, so I'm more excited than nervous.

<3

Before Braces: Living with an Underbite

I've had an underbite my entire life and to be honest it has been pretty soul-destroying. Try never smiling with your teeth, ever. Feeling self-conscious when you meet someone new. Laughing with somebody and then wondering what they saw - a whole mouth of crooked and underlapped teeth, most likely. Try not being able to chew food properly because your entire row of top teeth fall behind your bottom teeth, instead of slightly overlapping the front like they are supposed to. Try getting a stiff jaw every day and hearing jaw popping sounds whenever you open your mouth.

And you spend so much time trying to hide it, practicing in the mirror, positioning your lips just so, that nobody even notices it - but you do. And it's even more painful that they don't notice, because then they don't understand and find it difficult to empathise. 

Underbites really, truly, absolutely damage the quality of somebody's life. It's not a trivial issue, or insignificant in any way, it destroys self-confidence and self-esteem.

And the worst part? If you have no money, there is nothing that you can do about it. Too bad.

It comes down to this: Having unattractive teeth is kind of like having terrible body odour, except that you can have a shower or spray some deodorant to fix that. Or it's like having face full of acne, but you can drink more water, wash your face multiple times a day and reduce your sugar intake to fix that. Maybe it's like being overweight... Oh, wait, no, you can diet and exercise and have a positive outlook to fix that.

If those things - body odour, acne, being overweight - were just eliminated due to factors that you can control, your self-confidence would shoot on up. And while you can give me all of that, "some medications make people gain a lot of weight, they can't help it", or, "there's more to just being physically attractive, don't be so shallow", or, "some people actually have skin conditions that they cannot help, you know", you should know that this post and blog is not about, or for, those people. This blog is for those of you who suffer from an underbite, overbite, cross-bite, any image problems relating to your teeth and jaw. It is realistic and I will not sugarcoat any part of my experience.

It's not only about my underbite, though (although that it an immense part of it). The truth is, I've always wanted beautiful teeth.

I've always felt that it is that one thing that can make someone go from unattractive to attractive. And living in a westernised culture, physical appearance is, unfortunately, extremely important. So I don't believe that I am being shallow, only realistic, when I say that if I could improve my physical appearance, I would, and that it would ultimately get me further in all areas of life (stemming from a heightened sense of confidence and improved mental health that physical attractiveness, in my case, would provide).

Having nice teeth is not the only thing that you and I strive for to improve our appearances. We eat healthy to control weight gain, and exercise to maintain a level of fitness and health, and we reduce sugar intake to benefit our facial complexions. 

Nice teeth, contrary to these examples, is something that you cannot control. Sure, you can brush them every day, floss, mouthwash, you name it. Regular dental check-ups when you can fork out the cash, go for it. You can have pearly white teeth, no fillings, no holes, no cavities. Good for you, I can relate. But in most cases, your teeth will still be crooked, and no amount of brushing  flossing or rinsing is going to fix that. You know what? Ultimately, it comes down to money. At 22, I am, and my wonderful parents are, finally in a position to correct my very healthy but unfortunately fairly crooked teeth, and my excessive underbite which requires maxillofacial surgery (to move my top jaw forward) midway through my braces treatment.

And this blog will document all of these experiences within my journey from now until it is over. 

<3