Just read my third post if you don't wanna go thru' 3 pages. All my questions are there. Thanks.
Background information: I am a guy living in Singapore. I have 6 months left on my gap year before entering college in Claremont, Southern California. My malocclusion is class 2 'chimp look' (4mm overbite), i.e. it takes conscious effort to close my mouth, and when I do my lips look bit full. I think both rows of teeth are slightly protruding - so I will have to have both arches on braces, right?
Once upon a time, there was a young boy who though that having braces was only for the snobs and involved a as much pain and life-changing shock views that he wondered why would anyone be crazy enough to go for this procedure.
I have always had a thing with dentists, you can say that the early experience of seeing 2 full grown adults gyrating with all their weight on one tooth would have traumatized anyone. Even now my mouth hurts thinking about it. After my last baby tooth extraction I bid good riddance to a dentist ever laying hands on my mouth again. Well, a lot of time has since passed, and I should have known it was going to come up again. This issue has brought itself up increasingly over the past few years. Let me tell you the story of fighting my decision.
My mother took me to see an ortho recommended by my dentist (who, BTW knows that my teeth are amongst the healthiest she's seen). Ortho #1 told me that I would have to knock 4 teeth and lisp it through my freshman year of college in the US. So I thought, tooth shock + culture shock + social shock in freshman year = easy decision.
BTW, I went purely becuz my parents said I should get it checked out, and since I didn't see the need they left it to me.
Then about a year later (6 months ago) I went to ortho #2 (recommended by my aunt) and she said she could get it done in 9 months, before I entered college. Told me that my case wasn't too bad. But I decided to get a second opinion, went to ortho #1 again, who said she could only do it safely in 2.5 years, even with Damons. Then I began wondering what kind of medieval tree bark and hammer crazy ortho #2 was planning to use on my face to pull everything off it 9 MONTHS. I never went back to this ortho again.
So I did 2 straight weeks of research, reading every damn article on the internet and eating through the archives of this forum. Thought for so long and finally decided - you guessed it - go for it, that's why I'm writing now. But then my parents start to have questions, about how I would find life in college, how will I get it transfered, how much pain I would have to go through, how would I return to adjust every few weeks if I'm going all over the place in my gap year blah blah blah...... but I finally realized why I wanted to do it, and that is usually when things get done.
Well, the $3000 thrown in the splint and all the checkups was a small price to pay for the lesson: Never trust a single opinion and a single doctor. Of course the money could have gone to a better use, like shoving it down his throat or up his......3 generations of my family, and now I learnt this lesson the hard way. 
Heh heh. Will any facial/voice changes happen because of the braces (tried searching for this one). Will I find it tough, socially I mean, together with all the adapting I will have to go through in college? That means the next chance to get this done will be after my first or second year after my stuff is in place. But damnit I can't wait that long and I'm sick of postponing this sh*t! ARGH! 
