Listening to that little voice

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rahmama
Posts: 31
Joined: Thu Oct 27, 2011 11:54 pm
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Listening to that little voice

#1 Post by rahmama »

I have a whole team of dentists. One regular dentist, an orthodontist, and a prosthodontist. My mouth and jaw issues are so complicated, I can't believe it. When I had 2 molars extracted a couple of years ago, it left a gap that I thought was annoying, but it was actually slowly destroying my bite. Before I knew it, I had only a couple of teeth that were meeting & doing all the chewing work.

My prosthodontist made me a splint about 4 months ago to get my jaw re-aligned. This was before I could even think about getting braces. It worked pretty quickly and a week ago I finally got braced. My orthodontist modified the splint when he put the braces on, but something was wrong. The splint didn't feel right and my bite was all out of whack again. I thought it might just be part of the braces process, but I wanted to make sure. I didn't have another regular orthodontic appointment for 12 weeks (is that normal?)

I called both dentists this morning and have an appt. with the orthodontist tomorrow, but my jaw dentist got me in this a.m. Yeah! He agreed that the splint was now causing a problem and needed to come off. But to keep my bite aligned, he had to build up 3 of my teeth with enamel filler. There's such a huge gap on the left side of my bite that the 3 'fillers' look like stalagmites. I'm not kidding!

The good news: today's the first day I'm biting with real (sort-of) teeth, rather than gumming everything with the plastic splint.
The bad news: just as I was getting used smiling with braces, now I have a truly bizarre-looking lower set of teeth. :cry:
The other good news: I'm glad I listened to that little voice which told me to call my dentists about my concerns. My prosthodontist was very glad I called him and set to correcting problem on the spot. Without this correction, he told me I could have lost all the progress I'd made correcting my TMJ issue.

Just call me Fangs. :roll:

gramma2xander
Posts: 92
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 1:47 am
Location: Michigan

Re: Listening to that little voice

#2 Post by gramma2xander »

Wow, 12 weeks between orthodontist appointments! I will be going every 4 weeks.Not sure whats "normal".

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rahmama
Posts: 31
Joined: Thu Oct 27, 2011 11:54 pm
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Re: Listening to that little voice

#3 Post by rahmama »

I found out why such a long time before my second appointment. I got to go in today and ask all my questions and I'm feeling much better about the whole thing. My braces are from a new 3M technology called Unitech with a Smart Clip. There's no ligature and it has a Nitenol wire for the first 12 weeks which is heat activated and has 'memory' so works faster.

Anybody else out there who has this type of brace? Now that I know more about them I think they're kinda of cool. :BigGrin:

Here's a link to it:
http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/e ... martclip/

belistic10
Posts: 345
Joined: Wed Sep 28, 2011 5:49 am
Location: South Australia

Re: Listening to that little voice

#4 Post by belistic10 »

i also dont have to go to my first adjustment for 12weeks! so i still have 10.5weeks to go :lol: i only know mine are damon clear upper social 6 and the rest damon metal- no idea what wire etc but probably is the same as your describing! i have no ligatures either.
wow you must be so glad you trusted yourself enough to ask, and good thing you did by the sounds of it!! hope things improve soon!
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