Spacers

On Tuesday June 16th 2009 at 3:30 pm, a week and counting before my "b-day" (braces day lol) on June 23rd, I went into Dino's office so that he could put spacers on my teeth. Before that, I wasn't too nervous about the procedure because I'd thought I did something similar to that for invisalign to get the plastic trays to fit. However, as I began looking them up on YouTube and Yahoo!Answers, I realized I was sorely mistaken. Spacers are little tiny blue rubberbands that go in between your back molars and are left on there for a week at the most to make room for the molar bands (rings that go over your molars) that hold the braces wire in place. They are essentially flossed in between your molars and as I was beginning to find out from various websites, they hurt like hell and you had to stick to a soft food diet because it was almost impossible to chew hard or crunchy foods.

At first, I thought everyone on the internet was full of shit, there was no way that spacers could hurt that much. Right after the procedure and for a few hours afterward they barely hurt at all and I was thinking "WTF is everyone whining about?" until I got the last laugh trying to eat Boneless wings from Applebee's that my mom had brought home for dinner. It hurt! I mean, not really hurt; that's a strong word. It was we'll say "uncomfortable" to chew on my back molars for that whole week, which is bad for me because I use my back teeth a lot to eat because due to having half of a fake tooth for my front tooth (long story) I don't "bite" into foods with it. I was relegated to taking Advil before each meal just to make it through eating without wincing. Thankfully, chewing was the only problem I had in terms of pain with spacers; the rest of the time when I wasn't eating or biting down, the pain felt like shifting teeth; something I always felt when I got a new Invisalign tray and what made me miss them dearly =[. Those trays, after all, had been with me throughout my 4 years of high school. When Dino told me on my spacer day to not wear them anymore, I actually went home and cried a bit because it was almost like saying good-bye to an old friend lol. Even now as I'm armed with metal and rubber bands, my last set of trays before the 4/12/08 disaster are still in my blue case in its usual place of honor on the kitchen counter next to my dad's coffeemaker (yeah weird place to put them but whatever lol) =].

Next entry... my b-day!