Week 23

Power chains! I have the dreaded power chains!

So, I actually had my adjustment 2 weeks ago but as usual, have only just got around to taking a picture! My ortho finally took off those weird wedges on my bottom teeth, took off the thin wire that was supporting the non-bracketed teeth, and started my bottom teeth on a thick wire. I haven’t shown it in any pictures so far, but I’ve developed a sizeable gap of about half a centimetre on my bottom arch, but my ortho doesn’t seem vaguely concerned about closing that up! However, he pointed out that I was developing a gap between one of my top arch teeth (which I literally couldn’t even notice) and I’m now the proud owner of some power chains along the top 6 front teeth! Having done my interweb research I knew that these we’re going to be awful….and they were! The first two days after my adjustment were almost as bad as when they were first put on! Anyway, I dunno if they’ve closed this mythical ‘gap’ but they’ve made my front teeth start to overlap again which is making me sad. 😦 Here’s the comparison of week 1 to today (week 23)

 

So, they look much better, but here’s a picture of my bite (slightly tilted to give a better picture)

 

 

 

As you can see, it’s really not brilliant. My left side (showing in the right of this picture) is actually ok, but the right is a mess. Also, you can see my overjet here, which is now so big that I can get some of my tongue through it 😦 Obviously it was expected that my overjet would become more pronounced as my teeth were straightened, but my ortho almost seems to think that this is ok and has asked me what I want to do about my teeth extractions. SO. Here lies my problem. I’m not happy with my teeth as they are, but I also have this gut instinct that having 2 teeth out is going to really mess up my face structure, make me lose top lip support etc. I’m really stuck and don’t really know what to do…I kinda expected my ortho to take more of a deciding role in this given that he sees many more cases that I do! I suggested maybe teeth shaving as I’ve seen others have it done with great effect, but he didn’t seem to keen on that.

When I first got braced, he didn’t put brackets on the two teeth that were initially going to be removed, and they’re now pretty out of line. So, I’m going to ask him to put brackets on them to see what effect straightening them in line would have on my upper arch, and whether that would create enough space to maybe improve my overjet. I just guess that if that doesn’t work then nothing is really lost except for time, whereas if I have these teeth out and it ruins my face, I’m pretty stuck.

Sorry for the massive rambling, I’m just pretty stressed about the whole thing. I know my teeth look a lot better than they did pre-braces, but I just feel like I’m stuck in limbo and don’t want to make the wrong decision 😦

Thanks for reading if you made it this far! 🙂