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…

Two extractions and 10 days later, I got my first pair of invisalign aligners.

Yes i had two premolars yanked out.

Actually it wasn’t bad. The anesthetic really works and you’re just left with a big hole in your smile. Or two in my case.

How do the the aligners feel?
Well, did you ever get the feeling that your teeth are ever so slightly out of position and you just need to push them back with your tongue? Yes? Once or twice? Well, imagine that sensation on most of your teeth and they won’t go back. It doesn’t really hurt. Just uncomfortable to begin with. But this feeling wears off after a few days and then you’ve just got the unusual sensation of having all your teeth covered in plastic.

Of course its taken a few days to learn to speak properly with them in – there’s less room in your moth to move your tongue around as you speak you see. So you have to open your mouth wider and pronounce esses, tees and and simlar sounds more with the teeth and less with the tongue.

I also had my first batch of stripping – removing a small amount of enamel between two teeth to create more space for them to move. This was a little hair-raising for the first minute, because it’s done with what looks like a mini grinder and a measuring tool you might recognize from tuning your spark plugs. The process is actually painless and pretty quick too.

My next set of aligners is due in a week, already I think I’m starting to see some improvement from this one.

At the suggestion of my dentist, invisalign have produced an alternative treatment simulation. This time we’re considering the possibility of removing one premolar on each side of the lower jaw.

The new simulation (Simulation 2 video) – the end result is basically the same. If you look closely you can see the two premolars vanish about halfway through the simulation, although they will actually be extracted before the first aligner and are shown in the simulation only to illustrate where they were.

If you look at the side view though, you can appreciate the difference; thanks to the space created by extracting the prmeolars, all the lower teeth can move forward rather than back. Moving my wisdom teeth into a functional position.You can compare this to the side view from the first treatment and you’ll see that the wisdom teeth are pushed so far back that they no longer serve any useful function.

Of course this transition is considerably faster, shaving nearly a year off the total treatment time, but I do have to sacrifice two healthy teeth to do it and that’s gonna hurt in more than just an emotional way, I think.

Both treatments require some ‘stripping’ of teeth which, as I now understand, is a painless procedure of simply shaving down a little material from the sides of individual teeth to enable them to move closer together. This second plan requires much less of this, although that doesn’t really worry me anymore.

So, which approach do I choose?

I’m leaning more towards this second plan, including the extraction of the two premolars. Even though I am scared about the whole extraction process. “Feel the fear and do it anyway” right?

Smiley Face

I never really visited the dentist for the last… Well… 20 years or so. Just recently, though, I’ve started getting wisdom teeth through which are pressing against my molars at the back making all my teeth feel crowded and uncomfortable. So, to a dentist I set sail!

My dentist, aside from advising me on proper dental care, told me about invisible braces from a company called Invisalign. As a part of my consultation we discussed what could and couldn’t be done for my under-bite and overcrowded teeth and his advice was that, yes, braces such as invisalign’s can straiten and re-arrange my teeth for me to improve my smile over all, however, he couldn’t guarantee that they could help any with my under-bite.

We talked about under-bite correction and he confirmed my fears; My under bite could be corrected with a surgical proceedure – one involving cutting out a length of my jaw bone and one tooth on either side of my face, which would then require me to have my jaw wired shut for some time to recover.

We agreed to take some preliminary photos of my teeth and send them off to Invisalign for their assessment and, at length, a reply came confirming again that, yes, Invisalign braces could indeed smarten up my smile, however, again, they weren’t willing to offer any kind of guarantee as to whether the under-bite could be corrected. Nontheless, I still wanted my teeth alignment and positioning improved at the very least, so we went ahead and took some moldings.

Taking dental moldings is a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
First off, your dentist packs something like a gum-shield with plasticine* and shoves it onto your upper teeth. It’s not too bad and, after a bit of a wiggle, off it comes – easy. Then he squirts loads of slimy goo like Polyfiller* into the plasticine and shoves it back into your mouth and, lying there in the dentists chair you can feel the goo dribbling out of the back of the mold and your dentist won’t let you take it out. You lie there for what feels like an eternity. Every so often he pokes at the mold, pressing it onto your teeth firmly. And you lie there, staring at the ceiling, concentrating on breathing through your nose and trying not to swallow the, now solidifying, dribble of goo at the back of your moth.

It lasts a lifetime (well, a couple of minutes, it seems) and then, finally, he pulls out the mold and it feels like it may take a few teeth with it – thankfully it is over… Until you do the lower teeth. Thankfully the lower mold is not nearly as bad as the upper set.

*Plasticine, Polyfiller and other descriptions are probably a misleading description of professional dental equipment that I don’t fully understand.

If anybody can invent some easy to use laser scanning equipment for use in scanning the position and condition of all the teeth in the mouth and make it cheap enough for all dentists to have one will win the appreciation of anybody who has ever had dental moldings taken. Please do it soon.

Anyway, after these traumatic few minutes, we had some moldings of my teeth, which were promptly sent out to invisalign for, I assume, laser scanning and computer modeling and, soon enough, a computer simulation of my gnashers came back and, under the instruction of my dentist, this simulated treatment was created: Teeth in motion…

Good eh? Reminds me of an animation by Terry Gilliam in one of the Monty Python movies – Conrad Poohs and his Exploding Teeth or something similar.

So that animation is actually two years of treatment going from crowded under-bite to tidy smirking smile. Did you notice? The under-bite fades through to a more socially acceptable over bite alignment — just. Unfortunately this does mean that, for a few months, I will have to be very careful when eating to avoid crunching and otherwise damaging my teeth as the upper and lower sets cross positions. Also, I will have to have ‘tooth coloured’ fixtures attached to four teeth on each side of my mouth for most of the treatment time.

How can you re-arrange an over-crowded smile without removing teeth?
Well, as I understand it, the typical British way of making space in the mouth for this kind of movement is to sacrifice one or more teeth and spread the remaining teeth out. However, the method proposed by Invisalign was to shave a little bit of material off most of the teeth creating enough space between each to move, rotate and rearrange them. I don’t know yet if this process of shaving material off teeth is painful at all. I will find out.

Did it work?
I haven’t started my treatment yet, my dentist suggested we get another simulation – this time doing things a little more traditionally and removing a couple of premolars in an attempt to reduce the over all treatment time. I’ll post again when this simulation arrives.

Disclaimer: I am not sponsored by Invisalign and, while they are welcome to give me free stuff, I did not get any free money or stuff from my dentist or Invisalign for posting this.

This blog post was a bit graphic and, due to the nature of its content, should not have been read by anyone.