Braces Follow-Up: August 5, 2010
I waited quite a bit for Dr. B today but at least I was entertained by watching the Food Network channel. Not the best preoccupation after having to abstain from eating since 8:30 this morning (appointment was scheduled for 12:15 pm), but a necessary inconvenience to prevent vomiting or worse, aspiration. I had two questions for Dr. B before I would allow them to take the impressions:
1) Where the retainers would anchor from? (I’m still undecided about whether or not to pull my last wisdom tooth; right lower). As you can tell, I know very little about retainers from even asking this question. The dental assistant assured me that the retainers would anchor very similar to the points where the braces begin and end now.
2) For the past week, I’ve been seeing a gap re-form along the front lowers (smack in the middle) and wasn’t sure if that would render today’s impression inaccurate and a waste of everyone’s time. Dr. B said this small gap could be corrected with braces or even retainers so you can guess what I chose.
The first set of upper and lower impressions were a failure. Dr. B wasn’t happy with the way they looked so he had his regular assistant redo both of them. The glue that they added to the impression mixture stung my mouth =(. At one point they had to add a little water since my brackets were ripping the impression apart as they were trying to ease the mold out of my mouth. The first time my uppers were taken, I gagged a little since the first assistant held onto the mold with more pressure than I would have liked. The second assistant held onto my chin so tight when she was doing the lowers I thought my chin would bruise. I kept quiet and wanted them to do a good job since 5 times at trying to get the impressions as perfect as possible was uncomfortable, all over my face, nose, & clothing messy, and just plain gross (like plaster in your mouth) yuk yuk! Thank goodness, a little bit of water seemed to do the trick and so the impressions were finally good enough to send off to the lab. Now I see why Dr. B didn’t want me to eat for a couple of hours before the procedure… Yeah, I definitely can see people vomiting from this procedure.
There was an infomercial on t.v. regarding dog dentures while I had the mold in my mouth and I started to crack up a little. Can you imagine that? Worse time I could be trying to laugh.
I asked for pink elastics but had to settle for red or purple. I want to like red but it’s not a lucky color for me. I felt a little childish turning down the red but whatever.
For the next appointment, I will be looking forward to transitioning from braces to retainers, a deep cleaning, and a whitening. All these will probably take a few hours in total. It will be well worth it once I can walk out of the dental office with some new-found freedom, happiness, and confidence. Time to get out the Sensadyne =). Yippeeee!
*Last braces photo YEAHHH =)!
