Something I’ve been asked a lot recently is: “Have you always had braces?” No, of course I haven’t, what a silly question. So I tell them that I got them about two weeks ago and the next question is always: “Why so late?” Good question my friends, good question. The tale is long and I’m tired of telling it, so here it is out in full once and for all: the story of my teeth.
So when I was a kid my dentist was this jolly South African bloke who always used to be really pleased with the fact that I cleaned my teeth everyday. “You make my day!” he’d always say and whenever we asked about me having braces (because I’ve had wonky teeth as long as I can remember) he’d just say to wait until my mouth had grown more.
A few missed appointments and dental office staff mishaps later, I found myself with a new dentist, with an accent that I found very difficult to understand, who referred me to an orthodontist. Unfortunately when my dad was booking me an appointment he very helpfully booked for a time when I had a school lesson and failed to tell me about it until I got home that day, when I had already missed it. “Never mind, you just phone up and book yourself another one then.” But I was (and still am slightly) scared of phones so I just didn’t. For about a year.
Eventually I got myself re-referred and examined by an orthodontist who told me I had severe overcrowding (great tell me something I don’t know) and that they’d send a letter to my dentist to remove some teeth. Months passed and no word from the dentist. I phoned up again to ask them to resend it but clearly there’s a tooth care related problem with the postal service where I live because after three letters had supposedly been sent the dentist was still insisting “What letter? We haven’t got any letter.” What made it worse was that every time the orthodontist had to sign this letter personally but they only seemed to work about one day a week, so it just seemed to never get done.
In the end I personally went to pick up a copy of this letter from the orthodontist and then hand delivered it to the dental practice, only to be told that it wouldn’t be read for about a week because the dentist was on holiday. I think I might go for a dramatic change in career plan and tend to people’s teeth because it seems to me that they almost never have to work!
Anyway, eventually I did get those four teeth taken out, so that was fun! It sounds stupid, but it just never occurred to me that there would be centimetre deep holes left in my mouth where my teeth once were. They were kinda cool to look at but just the right size for rice to get stuck in, unfortunately. Other fun experiences relating to my tooth extractions were sneakily stealing salt from the canteen to make salty water to rinse my mouth out with, and deciding to keep not just one but all four of my removed teeth, which now make an excellent bookshelf decoration.
Then of course I had to wait another two months or so before I finally got braces fitted. And of course it would be the day that my friends and I decided to go busking in the pouring rain and the rest of the town (by which I mean a shop on the same road as my orthodontist) would catch fire. Because the road was closed, I had to follow this random stranger through a winding back alley route and then duck under some police tape just to get there, squelching onto the dentist chair in my sopping wet trainers.
You won’t be surprised that I was not feeling prepared / looking forward to this. However funnily enough that night I was feeling pretty good about having braces. I felt no pain; I could speak completely normally; and I chewed through sausages the same as normal without feeling a thing. I was beginning to wonder what anyone had been complaining about.
Oh how naïve I was.
The following morning after my teeth had started to move, I spent a full half hour just getting through a sandwich. Incapable of biting, I had to rip the bread into tiny pieces and then hold them one by one in my mouth until my saliva had mostly dissolved them. And even that hurt.
Worse, I soon realised though, was the longer lasting lip pain that comes from the brackets rubbing against the inside of your mouth and causing all sorts of cuts, ulcers and blisters. It was this that forced me to sit in maths holding my lip away from my face so that it wouldn’t rub, looking like at 18 years old I still sucked my thumb.
Never mind, the pain is over now, and all I have to deal with is my list of banned food items, which includes: fizzy drinks, fruit juice, and sugar in your tea; not just toffees but all chewy sweets, hard sweets and acidic sweets; tomato ketchup and vinegar; crisps; apples, raw carrots and nuts; crispy roast potatoes, pizza crusts and crusty bread; dry cereal and toast; chocolate and basically anything else with sugar in it. Yeah, nobody keeps to this stuff.
The Elephant in the Room 