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