Living with braces

And here I am, into second months living with my braces. Let's see how braces affect my life... actually, a lot. Eating is still a challenging task and it takes me very long time to finish my meal. The most friendly food is fish. Forget about noodle with a soup since it's difficult to cut the noodle. Let's see the good part. I can feel my teeth are moving (literally). I can see them aligning quite well.

Finally got my braces

Here is the day, I have my ortho put the top braces on. I chose to have soft pink colour. So, the good thing about wearing braces is that you can choose your own colour band and change it every month. Next month is definitely soft blue, and after that purple, and so on. Ok, enough talking about the braces appearance. Now, let me tell you how it feels. It feels so much better after I got the wire and the rubber band. The hard surface is now become smooth, so no more wax required to cover the brackets. Nevertheless, the pressure is there. I feel my teeth being pressed inward. Other than that is the end of the wire keep poking my inner cheeks. But, all in all, everything is fine.

3 days wearing spacers

Ok, so it's only been 3 days since I got my spacers. I was surprised that the spacers didn't hurt at all, so either I have a very good ortho or my teeth are just obedient. But I did have a huge problem. I found that my diet has to change a lot.I am not able to chew anything due to wearing this rubber separators, so I ended up eating porridge and drinking juice. It didn't work, I still felt hungry and bloated. After all, I'm that kind of person who eat a lot. I tried some other variety of meals:

1. Steamed fish

2. Pasta

3. Cooked vegetables

4. Steamed peanuts

5. Instant noodles

The best of all is instant noodle. It's still one of my favourites. Instant noodle with an egg perhaps the best thing I had for the past 3 days. This packet of instant noodles can beat $10 steamed fish I tried in a Chinese restaurant. Eating can be very tough when you cannot chew anything. It does start hurting to chew so I refrain from any food that needs chewing and I ended up eating less amount of food.

Another problem is the brackets. I felt weird wearing one but still managed to smile here and there. Overtime, the brackets started hurting my inside mouth; my dental wax is a life saver in this case. Fortunately, my work requires me to sit in front of computer 8 hours a day and most of the time I communicate with other colleagues via messenger so I don't need to speak a lot. Talking about colleagues, once I started wearing braces my colleagues started questioning my decision. They thought it's such an unnecessary thing to do.

I cannot talk about my problem with braces to just anyone, cause either they will get bored or they are just not interested at all. So, most of the time I will just say it doesn't hurt and everything is fine. But I do have a friend whom I know I can be wimpy to. I wrote him an email checking if he's back in Singapore already and he called me to check how are things going with me. The first time for the past 3 days I can actually spill out my feeling. It's good to have someone who has been there before and 100% supports your decision. That's an instant relief.

Second ortho appointment

Finally, time to put separators. Almost all articles in the Internet says that separators are going to be the most painful one, worse than braces. So, I took the liberty of taking a pain killer while waiting for my turn to see my ortho. The process was as expected painless. However, I didn't expect to have my top row teeth to be glued to metal brackets, without the wire being attached. The wire is supposed to be attached by my next appointment. For some reason I will only have my lower teeth to be braced in 2 to 3 mths. If I'm not mistaken the doctor said that it's because the metal in lower teeth can hit metals in the top teeth. Not quite sure since I didn't put attention at all. Anyway, so here I am with 6 spacers in between my molars and metal braces on my top row. Aww, I can't wait till next week to put the wire on and to remove the spacers. At the end I want to get colorful ligature compares to metal one like now.

The start of a new life

Today is the day. I woke up in the morning had tons of courage like a warrior ready to go to a war. The difference is that I went to a dentist and gave the letter from my orthodontist to the dentist at Camden Medical Center. Dr. David Ng, that's his name. When he looked at me the first question he asked was "Why do you want to put braces? Your teeth look fine." I was like "No, not now doc when I have managed to gather enough courage to come here to extract my teeth." So, he looked at my teeth and said "Well, a bit overcrowded here. ok, fair enough. But do you really want to extract 4 at one go?" And I said "yes".

And the teeth extraction began. Firstly, I got anesthesia injection at four places, the first round was okay, the second round was hurt a little because the injection was put on the ceiling of the mouth. Secondly, the pliers came to pull out the teeth. At this point the only thing I could do was trying to relax myself. So, I was imagining myself drinking a glass of wine on a beach. Somehow it worked and soon I was distracted by my own thought rather than listening to the cracking of my teeth. The whole process lasted about 20 minutes. I would say it was painless at that point. However, 10 minutes after extraction when the numbing effect gone I started to feel pain everywhere. I wished I have accepted my friend's offer to pick me up from the dentist or at least brought my teddy bear with me, I really wanted to hug on something. On top of that I couldn't say a word to anyone, I was hoping that I brought writing pad to communicate with the dentist, his assistants, and the security guard.

The journey went back home felt like ages and I couldn't even close my mouth due to having sterilized pad in my mouth to stop the bleeding. It's still dripping a bit though. Unfortunately, the pain killer can only be taken 1 hour after teeth extraction since I was not supposed to drink or rinse within one hour to wait until the blood clot was relatively stable.

I've just finished watching The Duchess. How ironic the story is, the higher rank one has in social ladder, the lesser option of spouse one can choose. The sad portion is when someone has met the love of her life but has to part from him for good due to this social hierarchy and spend the rest of her life trying to forget that person and live the life that she doesn't want.