Not To Be Trusted With Knives

They Just Keep Putting More Things In My Mouth!

April 16, 2011 by Beth

Had yet another orthodontist appointment this past week. The last time I had an appointment, they added elastics to my ortho repetorie. This time, in addition to having me continue to wear elastics, they have added “chains.” When the orthodontist’s assistant1 said, “We’re going to put chains on this time,” I had visions of my teeth being required to drive up a snowy mountain. “Um, what are chains?” I asked. A chain, as it turns out, is a little chain of elastic-y material that they loop over the brackets of your braces to add yet more tension to move you teeth. I was given the option of clear or silver, but was warned that the clear one stains to a yellow colour really easily and since I will have these chains on at least until my next appointment two months from now, I opted for silver.

You can see my chains in this photo:

You can also see the new gap in between my bottom two centre teeth2. As the braces have moved my teeth that were all cramped into together, we could now see that some of my teeth were sort of triangle-shaped, so my orthodontist shaved off a bit of the sides of a couple of my teeth to make them have parallel sides. Now the braces will be able to move those teeth so that they can be aligned properly side-by-side.

My ortho also mentioned that my front teeth were pretty worn down and I reminded her that they were the ones that had been root canaled when I was a kid and then she got this concerned look on her face, wiggled them a bit, mumbled “hmm, they *are* a bit mobile” and asked the assistant to take an X-ray of them next time. Got me a bit worried, but I’m hoping the fact that she didn’t ask for an immediate X-ray is a good sign?

1. What is the correct name for that person? She’s the one who installs the braces and replaces wires and basically does 99% of the work when I go to the orthodontist, but I don’t actually know what her proper job title is. [↩]
2. The gap below my tooth on the upper right side of the photo isn’t new. That’s just part of the worn-downness of my root canaled tooth. It will have to be fixed with restorative dentistry once this whole braces thing is done. [↩]

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