The current countdown is 1 Years, 2 Months, 19 Days, 11 Hours and 21 Minute until I smile.

The braces continue to keep me entertained. I notice that all the teeth on the right hand side of my mouth are gradually shuffling into their new positions. Not much movement on the left side yet, although I notice that the aligners I’ve got at the moment say “Rx Only” on the packet. So presumably the Left side will get moved around later. I’ve had two ‘stripping’ appointments with my dentist which, was a slightly scary experience at first;

Admittedly I was only scared because the dentist produced what can only be described as a miniature grinder and then said ‘Hold still because I don’t want to cut your face’. Maybe I’m just a bit of chicken.
Anyway the process is painless and pretty quick. You get a small cloud of enamel dust coming out of your mouth as material is shaved off the sides of two teeth to create a gap. Typically the gaps created in my mouth were around  0.1 – 0.3 mm each which is, I’m told, an acceptable loss of material for each tooth and since the loss comes from between two teeth, I reckon’ each tooth is only losing roughly half of that.

I’m on aligner 6 now. No more stripping needed until next year. I’ve also got a complete schedule of all my aligners and appointments for stripping & checkups until the end of the treatment in February 2011. I must say I am looking forward to having a smarter smile. But the aligners can be irritating at times; sometimes I feel like i’ve got a bit of something in my mouth that I just want to spit out. Unfortunately if I do, I’ll probably have to buy a replacement set of aligners or skip forward / backward a set, which could be unpleasant.

Oh well, only 1 Years, 2 Months, 19 Days, 11 Hours and 09 Minutes to go…