The End is Near: Getting Rid of my Braces

What do you get when you put a dentist, an oral surgeon and an orthodontist together? I'm hoping I'll get a final resolution to my dental injuries.

Regular readers may recall my bike accident from last summer, when I fell on the pavement and broke my eye tooth, knocked two other teeth out of place and fractured my arm. I got braces a few days later to straighten out my displaced teeth and make room for a dental implant. The first part of my dental implant is in place and healed, and a temporary tooth is attached to my braces; in a few weeks I'll get the second part of the implant in, and a few weeks after that, my dentist will take a mold of my teeth to make a crown.

What this also means is that I'll soon be getting rid of my braces. They can't take a mold of my teeth with braces on them, so my dentist plans to attach a temporary tooth to the adjoining teeth right after my next surgery. We can't just leave a gap in there. First, I don't want to go around missing a tooth. Second, the surrounding teeth might drift out of place--and there's barely enough room for a crown as it is. If all goes according to plan, my orthodontist will take all this metal out of my mouth in a few weeks.

I was so happy at the thought of getting rid of my braces that I had a celebratory hamburger (without the bun). I may have another one for breakfast.

Comments

tess said…

hurrah!!! times like this, i remember the old commercial, "how do you spell relief" -- in this case, n-o-b-r-a-c-e-s. :-)

March 15, 2013

Lori Miller said…

I guess I shouldn't complain too much about having braces. It's better than having a couple of teeth yanked out or going through life unable to chew. But I'm still in deliriously happy mode at the thought of getting them out.

March 15, 2013

Maria said…

HI i raad about your tuf toe and i got that about a week ago how long did the DR tod you to keep your toe rap so it wont move i know u said it take a month for it to get better

March 19, 2013

Lori Miller said…

The turf toe was four years ago, and it was before I started blogging. I don't remember what the doctor told me, but I probably wrapped my foot up for a month.

March 19, 2013

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here . * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fermented bread and butter pickle recipe ft. L. Plantarum

After Dr. Davis said the other night that L. plantarum may reduce some of the effects of the herbicide glyphosate (which is everywhere), I'm re-running my recipe for fermented bread and butter pickles. Pickling cucumbers naturally have L. plantarum bacteria on them, and fermenting them with some brown sugar multiplies these bacteria. (Just don't use chlorinated water to wash them.) And if you're growing your own cucumbers, avoid spraying the fruits with Bacillus thuringiensis , or Bt (leaves and vines are OK). It's unclear what effect a big dose of Bt would have on humans. Another benefit of DIY pickles: no emulsifiers like polysorbate 80, which is a common ingredient in pickles. If you have GI problems, it could be from emulsifiers. These sweet-and-sour pickles are the tastiest I've ever made. There's just a little added sugar (some of which the bacteria will consume) and turmeric that gives the pickles their bright color. Special equipment Quar...

Cardio: A Waste of Valuable Dance Time

"I'd rather hold a girl in my arms than a football." -Joe DeCicco, friend and dancing fanatic Have you heard that it takes a woman 77 hours of exercise to lose a kilogram of fat? (For us Americans, that's half a pound.) That's according to a study cited by Dr. John Briffa .(1) The women who huffed and puffed three hours a week for a year ended up 4.4 pounds lighter than the sedentary women. That doesn't surprise me: my own weight loss involved a lot less exercise than what I'd been doing. I did no cardio workouts, just strength training . I had more time and energy for dancing, which is a stress reliever, helps keep me in shape, and it's a ton of fun. It's not expensive to dance (as long as you stay away from the studios). I've found excellent lessons at clubs where the teachers really care about the students getting it. Here in Denver, there are dancing clubs that are run by nonprofit organizations, where the prices are reasonable and...

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog