Braces Strike Back

Tomas got his braces off a few months ago. Not like anyone outside the family would know that, because we’ve all got masks on all the time when we’re out of the house. (Though maybe people can see it in Zoom?) But after years of orthodontic work, he was finally freed, and there was much rejoicing.

But what’s the point in just not making a 45 minute drive to Augusta once a month? Daniela wanted to make sure we didn’t miss out on that opportunity, so she bravely volunteered as the next tribute to Orthodontia the Fearsome. The good news is that if you had to get braces during your life, having them come when you’ve always got a mask on is probably about as ideal timing as you can get. Then again, if you had to have uncomfortable medical procedures done on your mouth over the course of two years, I can think of better times to do that, as well. It all depends on how you look at it, I suppose.

Also: these things aren’t cheap. I didn’t really appreciate that side of things when I was getting my own teeth done back in high school, but it’s something I’m all too aware of now. True, we have dental insurance, which covers $1,000 of work for each child, but . . . that’s only a fraction of the total cost. The good news for Daniela is that her jawline is in pretty good shape, so she’ll be missing out on some of the worst parts of the process Tomas went through.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason I have such a hangup about dentists is that I didn’t go through all the bad dental experiences as a child. I didn’t have cavities until past high school. I never got my wisdom teeth out. Even for orthodontics, I only needed braces on the front part of my bottom teeth, and a retainer for the top. So I just haven’t had a lot of experience when it comes to dental work. Denisa’s an old pro. Tomas has had to face a root canal already. Daniela had two wisdom teeth out before she was a teenager. The worst I’ve still had to deal with has been cavities. I’m not complaining, but at the same time, even going in for a cavity filling is super stressful to me.

Oh well. Water under the bridge at this point. For today, send some good thoughts Daniela’s way. It’ll be a long two years, no doubt . . .

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Time for Implants

I realize there’s a fair chance a number of you read that and thought of a certain kind of implants, and wondered what in the world I was writing about today. Those aren’t the kind of implants we’ll be discussing today. Rather, I went to the dentist on Friday for my checkup, and I mentioned that a tooth had been giving me some problems on the lower left hand side of my mouth.

Not huge problems, mind you. A year ago it was sensitive to cold twice in the space of two days. And then that flared up a bit here and there over the course of the year. During the Super Bowl, it hurt when I was eating Doritos, of all things. But that’s about it.

So they decided to take a look. This is generally not followed by happy news when you’re at the dentist, in my experience . . .

First of all, they noticed that I had a huge hole in my wisdom tooth on that side of my mouth. (I’ve got a big mouth. I still have all my wisdom teeth, and they all pretty much fit fine.) Not a cavity. A hole. There’s no decay around it. It just looks like a chunk of tooth decided that it didn’t want to be there anymore, and so it went away. But it needs to be filled, just like a cavity.

Second, there’s some gum soreness in that area, which indicates I’m probably grinding my teeth on that side even more than normal. (I’m a grinder. I wear a nightguard every night, and I actually chewed through the first one I got.) Apparently the pandemic has been causing a real spike in grinding across the board, so that’s not too surprising.

Third, they took an X-ray of the tooth. The one I was complaining about seems fine, but the one next to it is still a baby tooth. (I never had a real tooth in that spot to replace it.) And it appears that its root has finally cracked. They’re going to double check it, but if that’s the case, then I have to start looking at, you guessed it, a tooth implant.

I’ve now made the mistake of googling what, exactly, the process is of getting a tooth implant. For a person with a mild phobia of dentists, this does not look like a Fun Experience. It’s enough to make me start wondering if I couldn’t just give that baby tooth a pep talk to get it to work with the team for a while longer. (Especially since I’ve got a baby tooth on the other side that might start getting ideas as well.)

So I wondered if any of you fine folks out there have gotten dental implants. If so, care to share your experience? Should I just settle down and accept the fact that I’m getting older, and more and more parts of my body are going to begin to fail on me? Are there any other alternatives I should look into? (To implants, not to getting older.) Any info from real people I know would be greatly appreciated.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Joy of Orthodontics

I’m sitting here in the orthodontist’s office, waiting for Tomas to get wired up for his second round of heavy metal. This also means I just made the first payment for said round. Adulting is more expensive and far less fun than advertised, though on the plus side, it’s not my mouth. I definitely feel for him.

When I was growing up, I had to have some wiring done to get my teeth in order. I know there were braces involved on my bottom teeth, and I had to wear a retainer on my top teeth for quite some time. But the actual process is pretty much a blur. I don’t remember how long it lasted. I remember getting the bottom braces off, but not much more than that.

(Ironically, when I moved to Maine at the ripe old age of 28 and went to my new dentist’s for my first cleaning (yay dental insurance!), she noted that I still had cement on my teeth from those braces. I guess it had just been hanging out there for fifteen years or whatever. It’s gone now.)

While you have to worry about actually having the work done when you’re growing up, you don’t have to worry about anything surrounding that. How much it costs. What actual work is happening. To me, it’s sort of like the difference between being a passenger and a driver. Before I could drive, I never really paid any attention to how I got wherever I was going. The car was this magic device. You entered it in one spot, and then some amount of time later, you got out at your destination. I let my parents worry about all that stuff in the middle. (Likely because I was too focused on my Gameboy to really have a clue what was happening.)

Now that I’m actually in the driver’s seat, I pay a lot more attention. Straightening your teeth is a complicated, expensive process. As I said, this is already the second round for Tomas. The first one involved getting his jaw into the right position. As I was driving him here this morning, we were reminiscing on that process. It had involved putting pistons into his mouth. Actual pistons between the top and bottom jaw that controlled how he could open his mouth.

While this was (obviously) preferable to getting head gear, I still don’t like to think of what it would feel like to have that happen to me. Not being able to move my mouth the way I want to. Being stuck with it all the time. Ugh. Thankfully, that’s behind us now.

Denisa and I debated doing this second round, talking it over with Tomas some as well. The first one had been almost a necessity for medical reasons. It would have caused him headaches (both literal and figurative) to leave the jaw the way it had been. This round is more cosmetic, for the most part. In the end, we felt it was the thing to do now. Straight teeth can help your self confidence. Healthy teeth keep the rest of your body healthy as well. And doing it when everyone else is lets you avoid at least some of the self conscious bits.

Anyway. It’ll be a couple hours more before he’s done. No clue how he’ll feel at the end of it. Wish him luck.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Fun and Games at the Dentist

Going to the dentist has never been a favorite event of mine. (Is it for anyone?) And as I was lying there in the dentist’s chair this morning, contemplating my lot in life, I decided to try and come up with all the reasons it’s so high on my list of Unpleasant Things. (Anything to take my mind off whatever it was they were doing in my mouth.)

First off, I don’t understand what in the world is going on when I’m at the dentist’s. I get the process of teeth cleaning (more or less), but when it comes time to “restoration”? There’s a seemingly never ending flow of instruments going in and out of my mouth. Some of them drill. Some of them whine. Some of them beep. Some seem to do all of the above.

Sure, they numb you, but sometimes that numbing doesn’t quite do what you think it’ll do. There have been times I’ve had to get extra numbed because I can still feel what they’re doing. There have been times I’ve been so numb, I’m still drooling hours later. (I went on a date after dental work once. Bad idea. Ever tried finding a straw when you can’t feel your lips?)

Your mouth gets incredibly dry after being open for so long. You begin to wonder what exactly that liquid pooling at the back of your throat is made out of, and just how harmful it would be if you swallowed it. Have you already swallowed some? What if you can never swallow again in your life? And just how long have you been lying in that chair? And why is he getting the drill again? Did he find another cavity? He must have found another cavity.

That uncertainty. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not, actually. Maybe I’d be even more concerned if I knew exactly what each tool did. “Uh oh. He’s going for the Whizzbanger. That’s a bad sign.”

But hey: my cavity is fixed. I’ve sworn to always floss and brush, and renewed my vow to not forget. A vow not too dissimilar to the one we all make each year when we make a new goal to lose weight and exercise more.

On the plus side, this time my dentist took a close up picture of the decay in my tooth, showing it to me before he drilled. It definitely looked disgusting, and I definitely wanted it out of my mouth as far as possible. I think it was the most motivated I’d been before getting a cavity drilled.

Now if I could just feel my lips . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Let the Braces Begin

I keep meaning to post about this, but other thoughts keep getting in the way. TRC has moved onto that loveliest of life’s rituals: orthodontia. (I swear. Just when you think you’ve got the parenting thing down, new experiences keep cropping up.) Since he was the first of our children to tackle this obstacle, we had to do a fair bit of research and driving around to figure out who we wanted to wreck destruction and havoc on his mouth. And by “we,” I mean Denisa. She’s put in a ton of driving time, and there’ll be much more driving in the future.

I’ll admit I’m only loosely familiar with the processes that are going on in my son’s mouth. (There’s a sentence you hopefully don’t have to say too often.) I know there are pistons involved. And cranks. And devices that look like they were used as tools of torture in the middle ages. Also, rubber bands. Because everything’s more fun with rubber bands.

All I really know is that he doesn’t have to have head gear, which is super. Right? Right.

But all of this seemed fairly straightforward in theory. He goes to appointments. They stick stuff in his mouth. They make changes .We’re done in a half year or whatever. However, in practice, it’s been much different. He’s walking around with a whole bunch of metal in his mouth, some of which has to be tweaked at home. You’ve never quite felt frustration until you’re trying to figure out just how this Pyrax thing gets cranked with that little paperclip shaped tool, and having to do it in a way that doesn’t jab holes in the roof of your son’s mouth.

Fun times.

Then on Sunday, we realized the pistons were carving holes in his cheek. Holes. In his cheeks. Think about that for a bit. Sound like fun? So I got online and researched the problem and the solution, ending up jury-rigging some cotton rolls to get the pistons some distance away from his cheeks. It did the trick, though he looks more like a chipmunk now.

Hey–it’s Halloween, right?

Anyway. It’s been an adventure in my household for the past bit, but rumor has it that the cranking is done as of Thursday, so that’s one less thing we’ll be doing.

I had to have a retainer when I was a kid, and I had braces on my bottom teeth, but that’ s about it. Denisa, of course, had perfectly straight teeth (and perfect vision). I’m convinced she’s an upgraded model of the typical human being. So as parents, we’re going into a lot of this blind. Which is kind of par for the course for a first kid, but that’s a topic for another day . . .