Rachel Nabors

09:35 am: Monday morning toothy update.
Leah Hernandez is giving away roles in her latest Rumble Girls with donations over $10. Thank you for the incentives, Leah!

We're officially $30 over $4000. So just another $970 an I'll have the braces paid for! Of course, it's the $10k worth of surgery needed one year into treatment that I'm really saving for. I've always figured I could scrimp along if it were just braces, but that surgery has always been the real roadblocker. Where the hell is a young person starting out on her own supposed to find $10-20,000 in one year? I don't know, but seeing how many people have donated already (thank you, thank you), I have hope that it can happen. At the very least, I'm able to sleep at night without my eyes popping open every fifteen minutes and my heart racing.

It'd be really great if I could get all of this, braces and surgery, done for $15,000, but I have fears that they're going to want to widen my upper palette, too (ow). I'm not going to know until I start. And I don't want to start until I know I can swing the bare minimum. And stopping half way is worse than not starting in this case.

I'm going to a different orthodontist for a second opinion on March 19th. So far the consensus has been that the correction will run $15-25,000, but I might as well check. Maybe they will know something I don't, like a school or a program for low-income folks. It can't hurt. (Well, it will cost $30 just to see them, so it hurts just a little bit.)

Okay, enough babbling! My mother came into town. I must go feed her corn bread.

Tags: teeth

08:40 pm: Falling out? Not yet.
I noticed in a recent Sequential Tart editorial that it sounds like some people might think my teeth are going to fall out tomorrow. I wanted to clear some things up about what is going on with my jaw here, because certainly my teeth won't fall out that quickly. It's a bit more complicated than that, as you will see, and I want to be as upfront about this as possible so you don't get the wrong impression or think I'm misrepresenting my predicament.

The bone in my jaw is thinning, mostly likely due to the irregular wear and tear created by my cross bite. The human jaw, while chewing, generates about seventy pounds of pressure per square inch. Imagine that pressure misapplied, pushing your teeth in all sorts of directions they weren't meant to be pushed in. It's like having your jaw torn apart in slow motion over many, many years. This irregular movement makes the bones weaker.

If your bones are too weak, your orthodontist may not deem braces safe. You might even need to get a bone graft. Or your gums might pull back from your teeth. Either way, weak bones spell trouble when repositioning the bite, and it was alarming to watch the orthodontist's ears prick up like a fox scenting a wolf when I mentioned I have weak jawbones.

And that's the real problem. If my jaw gets too thin for them to wire me up, then I'll probably need more stuff done to my face and have to spend more money. (That's hoping they can do anything about it.) Without the procedure, my teeth will continue to loosen, and who knows what they will be doing when I turn thirty, forty, fifty. Loose teeth... loose teeth are very bad to have, and I don't want to be living off hot mush at thirty. And what happens to the joint my jaws hinge on? AGH! Not going to think too much about the what ifs. It makes my face hurt.

So if I want to correct my jaw, I need to do it before it weakens more, and that is why I freaked out when the dentist said my jaw was thinner than normal. I didn't expect it to start deteriorating in two years. It seems like I'm on a much shorter watch than I thought I was.

The ortho I saw suggested no more chewy/crunchy things like gum (I remember chewing a lot of gum when I moved--I wish I had known), caramel, and, this really irks me, carrot sticks. I'm also laying off the cereal and granola. The chewing is very tiring and probably not good. I think the key here is to avoid prolonged grinding motions. I'm trying to stick to softer foods that require less chewing. I'm hoping a change in diet will keep my jaw from worsening for the time being. This stuff all happens over long periods of time, so small changes today means big changes tomorrow. Let's hope they're for the better.

I'll ask the second orthodontist about this. Perhaps I can get more information or a different perspective on what is happening to my bones.

Gosh I'm tired of writing about teeth. I mean, Trent Reznor has new music! What am I doing writing about teeth?!

Tags: teeth