i can't floss without my 'equipment'... or can i?

oh, i can't believe i forgot. it was wonderful this morning! so the ortho lady took off my ties and wires and then asked if i wanted to brush with my wire off. i didn't hesitate, 'heck yea!' she handed me some floss and said, 'here, you can floss too, go crazy. i'll be getting your wires ready' i looked at it and was confused for a second, it was plain old regular floss. (well mint flavored but still). then i realized, i could FLOSS. with out floss threaders or special floss. it was so weird. after 4 1/2 months of taking 10 minutes to floss and it took 90 seconds tops. yea! now i'm depressed that i have wires again. and to top it off, i have power chains too. it's weird. the color isn't so much around my brackets anymore as it is in between them. it's weird now to look in the mirror, i feel like my braces are much more noticeable. and the 'raspberry' i picked seems awfully bright pink... oh well. i suppose after 4 1/2 months of braces i can have a day of being depressed about them.

my teeth feel bulky. and when i brushed it was not happy. :( i'm going to be sore tomorrow.

oh well. sore is good. sore teeth = moving teeth = surgery sooner!

new wires and wire ties and power chains, oh my! (19 weeks - 4 1/2 months)

had TONS of fun at the ortho this morning. got my steel wires in. they are the preformed arches, square steel wires. YEA! steels are good. i also got a buttload of wire ties, almost every tooth is wired tied. looks like 9 on top, 6 on the bottom i think. hard to see under the power chains. i'm not sure if i got all the wire ties because of the power chains, or because of the new wires. so either the power chains are not strong enough on each tooth, that's why i need them or if my teeth are just not angled correctly compared to the wire... eh. anyway, lots of pain for me!

so, ortho man thinks i'll be ready for surgery in, oh... 9 months or so! :( he and the surgeon have different ideas of how things should work. he thinks that the teeth should be absolutely orthodontically perfect so they just fall into place during surgery, whereas the surgeon thinks that the ortho work can be done after surgery. blah.

oh well. as long as ron's insurance doesn't change with the coming year, then i'm fine with it. if his insurance DOES change and i'm no longer covered... this surgery is happening ASAP.

fun. that's one thing i didn't want to worry about. insurance issues.

look at me, i'm an orthodontist! (18 weeks - 4 months...)

so, after 4 weeks of blue jellie braces i was getting sick of them. they started out a nice light clear almost sky blue. after a week or so they were greenish blue, but still pretty. it was only if compared to the original color taht you could tell that htey were discolored. fast forward to last saturday. my o-rings are icky greenish blue with hints of yellow stained ugliness. i decided on saturday that i didn't want ugly braces for my birthday (thursday). we had a lull in our day and i had some time so i grabbed my o-rings, my twirl on tool and my tweezers and decided to do a little experiment. took off a gross o-ring, and put on a new clean red jellie one. wow, did that look nice. so i just continued on down the line. i now have clean pretty red jellie o-rings. yea! i was able to change all of them, i even replaced the two that they twisted halfway on (to hold it on better???). but i did it! yea! and it looks SO MUCH BETTER!

off to the ortho a week from tomorrow. plan to discuss this surgery thing and see what's up and when we can do this. i'm all about as soon as possible. we'll see!