Almost 1 year with braces

I had my nearly 12-month appointment Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 4 p.m. with Dr. Willy Dayan himself. It was only half an hour. I mentioned how the elastics had irritated the inside of my upper right cheek so I didn't wear them much after 3 weeks of trying. He indicated that if my teeth are otherwise straight and upper and lower jaws fit together well that he and I can make a decision together as to whether it is necessary to perfectly fix the middle alignment. My tooth had been extracted 25+ years ago, more than half my life ago so the likelihood that it tries to return to where it was is very probable. Often, Dr. Dayan said, that people will wear the bands as much as possible particularly in the last few months only to have the teeth shift back slightly anyway. So it's not the end of the world if the top 2 middle teeth don't sit perfectly on top of the bottom 2 middle teeth. I concur.

I'm very excited though. At the end of the visit he mentioned that perhaps in 1 or 2 more visits we should have the end result. My upper left teeth had fanned out a bit too much so he tightened the wires there. In fact, he replaced all the metal wires that fasten the top solid wire to each porcelain brace with white elastics so I have even less metal in my mouth and my top teeth look whiter. :) The bottom left eye tooth was also adjusted to make it twist a bit more and close a small gap. I'm so happy now - maybe in 3 or 5 months I'll have my braces removed! Before summer, even after summer is well before when I was anticipating for it to happen. Yeah! I make a final payment in November this year, i.e. 8 more payments.