Jacked

I believe it was the middle of October that I went for my "conference" at the orthodontist. Mike was supposed to go with me but he bailed, so all the hard questions probably went unanswered. 

Anyway, I got a cool (read:gross) photo of the insides of my mouth from all sorts of angles (I won't comment on what Mike had to say about my mouth) and a fun pan x-ray of my jaw. Although I had seen x-rays earlier in the year at my periodontist, this was the first time I got a good look at

 the situation. My lower left wisdom tooth boog

les the mind - it grew in completely sideways. That's not going to be fun to take out.

On to the fun part - the molds. I better get these when this is all through so I can show my grandkids how messed up my teeth wear. And because I really want to spray paint them gold (have I mentioned that already?). Apologies in advanced for the slightly blurry pics - I asked the ortho if I could take some pics and decided to not use my flash, which affects the focus on my camera. Hopefully, here's what will one day be referred to as the "before" shot:

I've recently become friends with this girl who shares the same two front teeth as me. She's out of hand pretty so it makes me feel better about my current chompers, although she doesn't have the snaggle tooth. That would be my second tooth on the top on the left, which here is on the right side of the picture.

Again with the bad picture - here we have the top half of my mouth. If you notice the cauliflower looking area on the left side of my mouth (again, shown on the right). That would be the evil tooth that is behind the rest of my molars. My shitty dentist in NYC told me if I wanted it extracted, it would be considered cosmetic and would cost me $600. Fuck that shit. Now it has to come out. Hallelujah! My mom also had an evil tooth, which she had removed when she turned 50.

This here would be the future of my teeth. Sans pink stuff. This is what I payed an extra $100 to see. All I could think to myself is, "Seriously? You could've done a better job at glue those teeth in". I kinda don't believe that my teeth will ever look like this. Maybe it's the pink adhesive. Maybe it's the fact that I've got a good 2+ years to go before I get results.

A side by side comparison. The pink stuff is just so distracting to me. But check out how nice the bottom is supposed to line up. I didn't even care about what my bottom teeth looked like up until this moment right now. Guess I've been too focused on the top teeth to give it much mind.

All this exciting stuff aside, the ortho told me all 4 wisdom teeth have to go (duh), my 1st premolars, which are on the bottom, and my 2nd premolars (evil tooth included!). 8 teeth. I plan on doing it all at once, although she recommended splitting it up. How inconvenient! I don't think I would show up to get any more teeth pulled after dealing with 2 impacted wisdoms.

The verdict for the braces: 24 to 27 months and a lot of money (aside from initials costs, we will be build $350 every 3 weeks, which is how often I have to go to get those suckers tightened - you do the math). The ortho wants me to wait at least a month after oral surgery before they go on. She then gave me a recommendation for a surgeon her office works with regularly (this makes the oral surgery recommendations up to 2 or 3 now). All I have to say is that they better give me some good pain killers throughout this process.