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Twenty-three with braces

2 Jun

These days, the only major sign of my accident is the arch bars on my teeth. The oral surgeon told me that they’d stay on until my mouth is opening normally enough that he is sure they won’t be needed again. As the days progress, I find myself increasingly impatient for this to happen. I don’t particularly mind the look, and the arch bars aren’t even that visible. It’s just that I feel like I’m about ten years too old to have braces on my teeth.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been stretching my jaw muscles more and more. The oral surgeon only told me I should work on opening wider, but sometimes I work on the side-to-side motions a bit, hoping that it might help to correct the problem of the right side of my mouth opening further than the left.

The truth is that I don’t even really know how far my mouth should be able to open, or even what straight is. The latter question seems like it should be easily settled, but it’s not so easy because my front teeth aren’t perfectly straight. Some of them have shifted slightly since the accident (owing to my inability to wear a retainer while my jaw was wired), and two were chipped and then repaired artificially. The oral surgeon wants me to focus on keeping my chin straight, but even that’s not so easy because my chin has a small bump on the right side where it was stitched up. As for the width of the opening, I haven’t been able to find out what is normal, but I’m pretty sure that it’s wider than my opening of about four centimeters.

If there’s one thing that keeps me from sitting around and exercising my jaw all day long, it’s the understanding that my trying too hard to fit in may well have caused the accident in the first place. I’m not quite sure what could go wrong here. I doubt that my muscles are strong enough to break the bone again, but I’d rather not find out.

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The jaw today

29 May

By now, my jaw feels more or less normal. On the left side, the tingly numbness around the site of the fracture has diminished considerably. The area is still tender to the touch, however. I’m chewing most foods normally. In fact, I find that I’m more cautious about not breaking my newly repaired teeth (which are on the right side) than my jaw, so I’ll usually bite with my left teeth rather than the right ones. Oddly enough, I experience pain more often on the right side of my jaw than on the left side.

Other than that, all I have to share is a picture. I made an attempt to record a movie displaying the range of motion of my jaw, but I found that to be too difficult. Even taking a closeup picture was challenging and required several attempts.

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It seems to me that the size of the opening is progressing pretty well, but I don’t really have any good reference points. What is clear, though, is that my mouth still isn’t opening straight. This is perhaps most obvious from the misalignment between the lines between the pairs of teeth at the center of the top and bottom.

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Tooth repair (again)

27 May

Yesterday was a busy day, so I didn’t get a chance to write about it, but I returned to the dentist’s office to get my broken tooth repaired again. I was afraid that I’d get a lecture about watching what I was eating, but the dentist seemed to think that it was more likely that the break was caused by my teeth grinding against each other. I certainly wasn’t going to object to that hypothesis.

The dentist fixed the tooth again. This time, he didn’t need to numb my mouth because he wasn’t doing very much drilling. The whole procedure took about 20 minutes, and at the end he told me I was “better than ever”. He then had me move my jaw around to see if there was any way in which I could make my lower teeth collide with the newly repaired upper tooth. I managed to find an extremely contrived and awkward position that achieved such a collision, and the dentist shaved the artificial part of the repaired tooth accordingly.

The tooth has held up just fine so far, but I’ve been extremely careful not to use it to bite anything that will provide significant resistance.

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A step backwards

25 May

I just discovered that one of the two teeth I had repaired on Thursday is broken again. Surprisingly, it’s the tooth that was only slightly chipped, rather than the one that the dentist told me was likely to eventually need a crown. I’ve been avoiding biting into anything with it, so this is frustrating to say the least. I’ll have to call the dentist’s  office tomorrow morning and see what they say.

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New teeth

22 May

I went to my dentist’s office yesterday morning expecting to have my routine six-month cleaning. I had called to schedule an appointment a couple of weeks ago and explained that I needed two appointments: one to have the teeth fixed, and the other to get them cleaned. The receptionist scheduled one appointment, which she told me was for the cleaning. She said that the dentist would look at the chipped teeth and we could decide what to do about them thereafter.

When I went in yesterday, though, the dentist looked at my teeth for less than a minute before he started discussing the repair options for the front teeth. The fastest option was bonding, which he could do on the spot. However, for the tooth that was more seriously broken, this would probably eventually fail. The other option was a crown which would cover the whole tooth, which would also have the advantage of looking more natural. However, he wouldn’t be able to begin work on that while the arch bars were on my teeth.

I elected to get the bonding done, even though I knew it might just be a temporary solution for at least one of the teeth. The dentist numbed my mouth, and over the course of the next half hour had me periodically bite down and open my mouth. He then had me rinse my mouth and look in a mirror. The teeth looked terrible. The seam between the natural tooth and the artificial piece was very visible, and there were also white splotches on the tooth.

The dentist told me that I should avoid using the bonded teeth to bite into harder foods for a while. This, of course, wasn’t a problem because I had been avoiding harder foods altogether. He also told me that the repaired teeth would never be as strong as my natural teeth.

From the dentist’s office, I took a bus to campus, where my first stop was a bathroom to see if my teeth had somehow changed in the last twenty minutes. Somehow, they had. I didn’t even recognize my teeth when I looked in the mirror. At first glance, they looked natural to me, but upon closer examination I could see that they weren’t. I could see that the bonded piece was a slightly different color and a little bit shorter than the other one. Still, they looked much better than they had in the dentist’s chair. My guess is that when I looked in the dentist’s chair, there was some substance from the procedure on the surface of the tooth, but this had rinsed off since then. The idea of having swallowed this substance is not a particularly pleasant one, but I seem to still be alive.

Finally, a photo:Repaired teeth

The picture isn’t great, but for comparison, here are the chipped teeth.

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A healed bone (I hope)

20 May

It’s been six weeks to the day since my surgery. I’m going to see the oral surgeon this afternoon, and if all goes well, he’ll find that my bone has healed and tell me that I can start chewing softer foods again. I don’t know how he’ll determine whether the bone has healed, but my guess is that he’ll take an x-ray.

Regardless of what the surgeon might say later, my jaw feels ready. There’s still a little bit of numbness in the area, and I still can’t open it all the way, but it has acquired a feeling of strength that wasn’t there a couple of weeks ago. Three weeks ago, as I approached the moment of my unwiring, my excitement was gradually replaced by nervousness, but (at least so far) that isn’t happening this time.

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The remaining evidence

17 May

At the time of my accident, I didn’t take any pictures of the injuries in large part because I knew that my family would find the images disturbing. Now that the accident is six weeks behind me, I’ve taken a few photos that show just how little is left behind.

The most obvious pieces of evidence are in my mouth, where I have the arch bars, three rubber bands, and two chipped teeth.
My mouth, six weeks later
Next most obvious is my right elbow.

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There’s a little bit of a lump on my chin, where I had 12 stitches, still. It makes shaving difficult, but I don’t think it’s really as obvious as the following photo makes it look.

My chin, six weeks later

The weirdest remaining evidence is probably the dent in the palm of my left hand (below the pinky, almost on the wrist). The skin over that spot was torn off in the accident, and it seems that the muscle there was pushed off to the side.

My left palm, six weeks later

There are also a few pink spots on the backs of my hands and my left elbow. There are a few spots on my legs, too, but I don’t even know if those are from this accident. None of the wounds on my legs were serious enough that I (or the nurse at University Health Services) saw it fit to bandage them.

In related news, I’ve discovered that taking close-up pictures of myself is difficult.

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The new rubber bands

12 May

After dinner, I tried putting in some of the new rubber bands. None of them broke while I was putting them in, so it may be that these new ones are of higher quality than the ones I’ve had in the past. I would appreciate this very much because I’d rather not have to worry about running out of rubber bands.

After I put the rubber bands in my mouth, I decided to see how far I could open my mouth. The answer, it turned out, was far enough to break the rubber band in the front of my mouth. When the band snapped, it hit my lip, and my lip stung for a little while. I replaced the band with another one, opened my mouth not quite as far as the last time, and the rubber band I had just put in broke. I replaced the broken band again, and decided to keep my mouth shut for a while. However, this apparently wasn’t good enough for the rubber band on the right side of my mouth, which snapped a few minutes later while my mouth was closed.

I guess I’d say that what I’ve seen from these rubber bands isn’t particularly promising so far, but I’m doing my best to be cautiously optimistic.

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Checking in with the oral surgeon

12 May

Today was my two-week check-in with the oral surgeon, although I’ll actually only have been wireless for two weeks as of tomorrow. I went in to the appointment not expecting much to happen, and the appointment pretty much lived up to expectations. The surgeon asked if I had any problems or questions, and I mentioned to him that I’d need more rubber bands. He looked at my mouth and observed that I had done a good job putting rubber bands in. He asked if I had any more questions, and I mentioned that I had noticed that my mouth seemed to be opening a little bit further on the right side than on the left side. He had me open my mouth and close it a few times, and he told me that it looked pretty straight, but he could see what I was talking about, and that the exercises I’ll start next week will help with that.

The oral surgeon gave me some more rubber bands, “a whole bunch of them”, as he put it. These rubber bands came in a sealed plastic bag, which stood in contrast to the white paper envelopes I had received previously. I’m usually not a fan of plastics, but in this case I appreciated the difference of materials because the small paper envelopes have tended to fall apart in my pocket. The rubber bands inside were different, too. While the old ones were a yellowish color, the new ones were almost transparent. As I left, I hoped that these new rubber bands would be better quality than the ones that had been breaking so frequently over the last two weeks.

I made an appointment to return to the oral surgeon next Wednesday. After that appointment, I will no longer need to wear rubber bands, but the arch bars will remain in my mouth. If all goes well, the arch bars won’t actually be needed, but in case something should go wrong and need rubber bands again, it will be easier if the arch bars haven’t been removed. Also, I expect that after my next appointment, I’ll be able to start chewing soft foods again.

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Five weeks

10 May

It doesn’t feel like it’s been this long, but my accident was five weeks ago this morning. Life is pretty much back to normal, aside from being more lost than usual in my classes and not being able to chew.

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