Completely Traumatised

Oh dear, today was a challenge…

I was all geared up and ready for stage two, the fitting of the bottom braces. I made sure I stuffed myself silly last night and this morning I had breakfast followed by um, a second breakfast at starbucks at about 10.

I made my way down to the dentist at 12 and he asked me how I’d been getting on, I was quite confident but explained that it had been a very painful couple of weeks. The dentist seemed so surprised and said I should have come back in, I rolled my eyes and said, well I was kinda expecting that’s what it would be like!

Turns out the wire I’m using, although looks good, its 0.2 mm thicker than the usual one and this can cause discomfort – hhmm, not convinced. Anyway, this time they gave me diazepam – NOT to be mixed with alcohol and to take 1 hours before bed time – wahooo!

So I was all set and he suggested we try a thinner wire, which was fine by me, they fitted them on and my mouth felt like a plane crash. Because the inside of my mouth is so narrow, my teeth are all angled in so we now faced a new problem – my top row of teeth are biting down on the outside of my lower teeth which means every time I bite down I hit the brackets and not my teeth – does that make sense? Unfortunately, not a lot we can do, apparently in a few days the teeth will move and I will be able to bite again – yay! So dinner tonight was weetbix and a fruit smoothie.

Anyway back to the matter at hand, I walked out of the dentist and for some reason I just burst into tears and I simply couldn’t understand it. I mean, I was more nervous/ traumatized the first time round so why now, when I was all geared up was I such an emotional wreck?

I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror, to my horror the bastard had fitted a frickin aluminum wire and not the coated white one. I stomped my way back and practically shouted at him telling him that (and I quote, embarrassingly enough) “I’m not paying all this money to have a gigantic metal bar across my face” he calmed me down and explained that because it was thinner that I had to have aluminum and apologized for not saying that at the time. He said if I wanted to change it to the white I could but the pain would be worse and in 4 months time, I was going to have to change it to aluminum anyway. I burst into tears again and all the nurses, receptionist gathered round with tissues. I explained that this whole thing was rather a big ordeal for me and the dentist was very kind and simply said to me, has one person pointed out that you look any different? and I thought, well, no. and he told me I needed to overcome my own insecurities and just go ahead. So I did.

I apologized for my outburst, took 5 and went back to work, emailing my gay husband, KFP, Butdunc, MM, anyone who would listen, how mortified I was.

After a few hours the pain got worse, from having to hold my jaw forward so I left the office and came home. I then treated myself to a manicure at my local salon and a fruit smoothie and felt a bit better.

On the up, the dentist was really, really surprised how much my teeth have moved (check out my over bite in the pics below and how dramatically it has changed!!) he said the front 4 have totally rotated – yay!! Wahooooo.

My advice to myself today has been: “Get over yourself and pull it together”.