Metal Mouth Message Board

I added this to my "our braces stories" journal, but thought I'd post it here too.

Ok, this was a new one for me, the ortho's office, and i've never read anything about it on here:

There was one spot between the 2nd premolar and the first molar on the upper left side where the gum kept getting swelled up and would start bleeding if I touched it. I figured that there was just food stuck there and just flossed the heck out of it for a few days, but it just kept getting worse. Well, I was brushing at lunch, and I see something BLUE wedged in between the teeth.

I get in to see the ortho this afternoon, and it was a SPACER! Note: I had spacers 6 months ago!!!

The assistant's theory was that when I had the spacers in, it moved up and out of sight and when I couldn't see it, assumed that it had fallen out and then put a replacement one in. And when they removed the spacers, they took out the replacement, but didn't know that the original was still there. And so it took this long for the gums to reject the foreign object and move it out.

I feel pretty lucky that it didn't cause other problems like an infection!

So, lessons learned:

- I guess don't assume that just becuase you can't see a spacer don't automatically assume that it fell out.

- If things start bleeding and swelling up suddenly, there's a problem that needs to be looked at. Always go in to get it checked out. But on the other hand, if the assistant hadn't been able to see the blue, the last thing she would have thought the problem would have been was a spacer. Oh well.

oh my goodness, I'd never have imagined that would be possible! As you say what a relief it didn't cause more serious problems.

Hope your gum soon feels better.

srg1977

Unbelievable!! Your story is one of a kind....Glad it was detected eventually. Like I think, this board is very informative. Thanks for sharing with us. Wish you well.

Oh, wow! That must have hurt since they hurt when they are where they're supposed to be.

Ya know, I hate to say it buit Don't you see it everywhere now. People don't take the time to do a total check to see if anything is wrong. What ever happened to service?
That's just crap work long and short.
Over looking stuff pisses me off because of beinf in a hurry or just plain not paying attention.

If I had been in pain and been told that there was nothing wrong, I might be a little bitter.

But I seriously didn't feel any pain or think anything was wrong until about 4-5 days before I made the ortho appt, so I certainly don't blame any of the assistants who worked on me. The only way they could have known about the rouge elastic was if an x-ray had been taken, and since I didn't feel anything wrong, there was no reason to do that.

So i'm totally comfortable chalking this up to just a freaky thing. My relationship with the ortho (and all of the assistants) has been very good, and this doesn't change that. Heck, they got me an appointment 2 hours after I called and thought that something might be wrong.

If this had just been one more thing in a pattern of bad things happening, than I might think differently. But luckily, it's not.