Cassandra said:
I’ve really been enjoying how detailed you’ve been with everything you’ve shared so far.
Yeah, I wanted to give detail so that others here could better understand and/or picture what’s going on. I also initially thought I’d go to more than two consults and it would be interesting to compare the proposed treatments, but I really liked the office I chose and started to get impatient to start the process.
I also find myself being really wordy in written communication like this. :
I’m curious why you went with blue? I think in one of your previous posts you said you only ever did blue before, so I think I’d be tired of blue from the get go
I went with blue for a couple reasons.
One, because I have had it before, it feels safe in a way, since I know I liked how blue looked on me as a kid. So I figured start with what I know before branching out.
Two, based on my past experience and photos I’ve seen online, blue tends to not have shades that look much better or much worse than others, the way some colors can (say, green or yellow), and I didn’t want to worry about choosing the wrong shade.
Three, it’s more subtle than some of the bright colors, and some people I know are still seeing my braces for the first time. I guess I don’t want too much attention on my braces, at least not yet.
I do want to make sure to try other colors this time around (almost thought of telling the assistant to make sure I don’t just ask for blue every time!). Right now, I’m thinking of getting red at my next appointment, as it’ll be the middle of college football season and I’m an Ohio State fan. The appointment after that should be mid-December, so maybe I’ll get a good green for Christmas, if they have one, but I’m not decided on that yet.
I know some people like the all-metal look of self-lighting brackets and think that getting colored ligatures on them ruins that. I actually very quickly have really liked how they look. This surprised me, because it usually takes me a while to get used to a change (it took a couple weeks with the braces for me to not think they made my front teeth look huge, and a few weeks after that to be pretty used to seeing them in the mirror). I do wonder it part of liking the look so quickly is due to almost all of the braces having the colored ligs. My ortho’s office only puts them on the top front six teeth, but I only have eight brackets so far. Once I get full braces in another 6-10 months, I may feel differently when it’s just a minority of teeth getting the color.
Something about having the ligs on them makes them look more “right” to my eye, and a little more complete somehow, while still leaving a lot of shiny metal and being subtle since they are entirely behind the wire.
I also think if it were me in your place I’d be a little nervous asking such detailed questions from the orthodontist for fear I’d be “found out,” although I guess with so much information available online perhaps many many people would know enough to ask such specific questions and it’s nothing usual.
Yeah, I have been a bit nervous of being either questioned (“How would you know that?”) or dismissed when bringing up my concern that the front brackets have the wrong torque (the ortho I had as a kid seemed confrontational the one time I asked a question that wasn’t 100% in agreement with him). However, that’s offset by me not wanting the teeth to tip inward even more, which would extend treatment and, more importantly, look terrible I think.
I have been running a voice recorder app on my phone at the consults and appointments (I live in a one-party consent state). For the consults, it was great because I didn’t have to immediately write down every answer to every question I had, and I have the recording as something I can go back to to refresh my understanding of the plan of my treatment. For the appointments, there’s a lot of background noise to it makes it harder to listen to the recording (suction sounds during getting the braces on, and the room with the exam chairs has a really high ceiling, so it echos a lot).
Listening back to what the ortho said about my new wire at my appointment, he explained that because it’s not filling the height of the bracket slot, the torquing of the front teeth that I should experience before my next appointment will be mostly just from the wire wanting to bend back to straight across; you can see in my photos that my incisors are lower than the canines/premolars/molars, so the wire dips down in the middle to go through those brackets. At my next appointment, the plan is to get a .018x.0275 wire that will fully fill the slot, and we can see how it fits to judge the torque. My ortho said if that doesn’t seem like enough torque, they’ll try a .019 “set” wire, that is pre-torqued, and that kind of wire would really move those teeth
He also said that they can get out some low torque and high torque brackets for me to see the distance, and even take photos with my “macro lens” (I had told him the photo where the bracket slot was visible was taken with a macro lens, which is close enough to the truth; it was taken with a normal lens with an extension tube to allow it to focus closer; photography is a hobby of mine). I was pleasantly surprised by that offer. I suppose, though, that it shouldn’t be surprising that a (good) orthodontist would want to nerd out about some detail like that.
My ortho taking like that to me about those details and actually telling me the wire sizes in that part of the conversation is something I appreciate so much. The ortho I had as a kid didn’t interact with patients well. After the assistant had taken off your ligs and wire, he’d come over, look at your mouth for a second, maybe ask if you’d been wearing your elastics, tell the assistant something (wire size and elastic size/configuration) in a way that was indecipherable to a young teen, and then walk off.
