Hi, I’m new here and first want to say that I have really enjoyed browsing this site and reading about everything that you all have been through. It has been helpful and informative, thank you so much. It’s also why I just couldn’t resist joining.
I’m 47 and was braced on November 22, 2006, two months and 4 days ago. I must confess that I have had my moments during the past 2 months wondering what I had done!

It has been a bit of a whirlwind having jumped in with both feet (so they wouldn’t get cold). Actually, at first, this wasn’t something that I really, really wanted to do, at least not during the past 30 years. It should have happened when I was 13, I wanted it then, and was actually a week from being braced when things happened and later, no one ever got around to it. Well, during the past several years, my dentist has been trying to get me to an ortho as he kept insisting that it was the only solution for my bite and was actually something that should really have been taken care of years ago. Well, after seven years, fractured teeth, several root canals, 13 crowns and $15,000.00+ I finally realized that I had to do something when a 15 minute appointment for the cementing of a new crown took 1 hour and 15 minutes because the temporary had shifted due to the angle of my teeth and was really stuck. Should I have been surprised? No, because nothing I have ever had done was easy. Well, I finally asked my dentist who I should go to and he gave me 2 referrals.
Talk about fast! I called the orthodontist’s office a couple of hours later and had an appointment for the next morning. Well, after that, things happened. That day they put in spacers, and I had to learn to do it because he was afraid they would get ground up, and they did. I went through probably 40 of them in the two weeks before I was braced. Anyway, I have spent most of the past 2 months in the orthos office once or twice a week because I kept falling apart. It appears that it is very difficult to cement things to porcelain and I have a lot of that. I now have 10 bands on my molars because the brackets just wouldn’t stay. Also, I spent so much time in their office that I am not really sure when my “firstâ€