Teeth are moving!!

written Jan 8
Yes, it seems that ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, my teeth are moving. Dr O confirmed my suspicions when I saw him this week, and it's pretty exciting! Finally there is some forward progress. I also makes me feel better about the pain that I'm feeling in my upper teeth. See, I know that your teeth are supposed to hurt, at least be uncomfortable, when you have braces, but it's not so simple for me.  Because of all the previous damage to my teeth, pain can also mean that things are going very wrong with the actual health of my teeth, and could mean that they won't survive. So whenever I feel pain in my teeth, particularly my front ones, I start to panic a little. They obviously hurt when the braces first went on, but everyone told me that the pain would go away. And it did...but then it came back, in a different way.  It didn't feel quite the same as the pain was the first few days, and I didn't know whether it was normal, or scary.  I guess it was normal, because it's waning to.

The reason I had to see Dr. O again this week is because since having the lower canine tooth removed, my bite plate (once I felt brave enough to put it back in...) was so painful I couldn't stand it. It seems the teeth next to it were being crowded (big surprise for my mouth, lol) and now that it's gone, they have some space to....move. Everything's moving.  Well, this is a problem. I love that damn bite plate!! I didn't expect that the first day I got it, but I came to adore the damn thing. Having a mouth that feels normal again was so nice. The pain in my jaws and all the head muscles almost went away and I could sort of forget about all those problems. Which is ironic, since a massive appliance in my mouth did all that, but I sort of forgot about it too.  So Dr. O tried to change the shape of it, but it didn't really work so he is making me a new one. Ahhhhh!

Like I said, all those benefits of the bite plate made me sort of forget about my TMJ problems, and it wasn't on consciously, but I think I had sort of tricked myself into thinking that things weren't so bad after all. Well now that it's not in, all the issues are back. My jaw is super sore and my temporal muscles are really tight and painful. Joy! Then I was looking at photos of my son on our camera and didn't realize there were photos of me on there too. I saw one of myself and noticed how different the shape of my face looks now. It made me so sad...and realize that nothing had gone away.