Hello 2016!

I had my first orthodontist appointment of 2016 today! The appointment started out with those "wonderful" impressions. They were terrible. Mostly because my jaw could only open so far and the technician didn't really know what she was doing. She was super sweet but it took her twice as long as all the other technicians to do anything. My appointment was at 7:40am and my half hour appointment ended at almost 9am. Hopefully next time, I have a different technician.

After the impressions, Dr Klein came in and took a look at my teeth. As always, she was happy with the progress. So happy that she said I could take a break on the elastics (wahoooooo!). Those elastics are such a pain. I felt like I always had my fingers in my mouth cause I had to take them out and put them back in all the time.

Unfortunately, this elastic freedom is not forever. At my next appointment, I'll probably have to go back into wearing elastics all the time again. ;_; I guess the new wire I have can put too much pressure on the teeth if worn with elastics. TRANSLATION: I get freedom until my next wire change appointment which is in 5 weeks.

She also repositioned a bunch of brackets and fixed a broken (??) band around one of my molars. Not sure if it was broken or if the glue just failed after 2 years. I had that gross glue taste in my mouth practically all day today. Thankfully, that was basically it.

I did get the good news that I will definitely be out of braces before the summer! Yay! Depending on how diligent I am with wearing the elastics next time will determine when I can hopefully get my braces off. It's looking like it could potentially be April or May which is exciting! I'm in the home stretch and I can't wait to be free of these braces permanently.

My next appointment is with Dr. Keith for another follow-up on Feb. 16th. And then I see Dr. Klein 3 days later on the 19th.

On a more personal note, I do have a some what big announcement! Since my surgery is behind me and my recovery is going well, I've decided to finally start pursuing my masters degree. I'm going to Umass Lowell for my masters in Health Informatics and management which is super exciting! My work will help to pay for part of it so I'm starting small for now. It's been awhile since I've taken any formal classes so I'm only taking 1 class. If the course work isn't bad, I can always take more classes next semester.
I do have to apply to get into the program but a few people have offered to give me a recommendation which is amazing. My director at work said he would write me one which I was not anticipating at all. If I do well enough for my first 4 courses, I can bypass taking the GRE which will save me a lot of time and money. My class starts on Tuesday so I may not be posting very much except for after appointments and for status updates.

PS: I ate chips for the first time in 11 weeks today! They were very salty and took me forever to eat but they were so worth it!

Super long post - sorry in advance!

Here's another update and some good news! I didn't turn into jaws at this appointment!!! While I'm ready to be done with everything and be surgically-ready, not sure I was ready to have an orthognathic wire installed at my last appointment. My most recent appointment was Friday April 24th. I had an afternoon appointment which was very different for me. Usually with my schedule, morning appointments work best. However, this time, it just worked out that an afternoon appointment was best. A lot happened at this appointment so I'm sorry if this post is a tad longer than normal.

Dr Klein and I spoke and she looked at my teeth quite closely at this visit. She kept tilting my face and I constantly had to smile, open, bite down, smile again and then open again. Haha! One of my teeth was remodeled as a kid and I think it's proving to be a little difficult. I swam into a pool ladder and chipped my front tooth when I was 9 years old. It was fixed before my teeth were straight so they fixed it to match my teeth esthetically. Now that my teeth are straight and where they should be, this one tooth is a little larger than the other one. I will probably need to get it remodeled at some point but it doesn't really bother me that much. She said that she is now getting down to fine-tuning my teeth which is good because it means they are almost good to go!
 Dr Klein is so funny, she asked if I minded if she went a little OCD on my teeth. LOL. She wanted to re-position the brackets to fine tune the teeth to make them absolutely perfect. Moving the brackets would make my appointment run a tad longer (since it originally wasn't booked for a bracket re-positioning) so I'm glad she thought to ask. I think the brackets being moved maybe might have saved me from getting my "jaws" installed, so thanks for that! I'm hoping that I can put off getting that wire installed until the very last second. The other nice thing about getting the brackets moved is that they scale back on the wire for the next 4-6 weeks. The teeth can only take so much so they don't want to stress them out too much. So I went with a different wire and I have regular O-Rings instead of the viscous A-Chain. My teeth weren't nearly as sore as they have been recently. I thought I was going to be much more tender the next day but it wasn't too bad at all!

I was a little sore before I even arrived at the office though. Last Saturday, a bunch of our friends invited us to play beach volleyball with them. We had such a blast playing and it really made me remember how much I liked playing volleyball. I'd love to play in an local league or something but not sure it'll work out with my schedule and Don's schedule. However, halfway through our second game my husband punched the ball right into my throat/jaw on my right side. It definitely stunned me and he felt super bad. It didn't hurt at first but slowly started to get sore and very stiff. I think Dr Klein could tell that something was up with my jaw but jaw pain is not her expertise. She told me to call Dr Keith (the oral surgeon) which got me a little bummed. Something like this could derail my progress and slow everything down. She told me to call right away but I woke up on Saturday with less pain so I think I just need some time. If the stiffness/soreness gets worse, I'll definitely call Dr. Keith but I'm sure he'll just tell me to rest up and take it easy which is what I'm doing.

Right before my appointment was over, Dr Klein told me that she has a patient who reads my blog! Wow! I mean, I know that other people besides friends and family read this but it's really crazy to hear it from my orthodontist. Due to HIPPA, she couldn't give him out my information however, he gave her his card and told me that I could take his information and do what I wanted with it. I was so amazed that I couldn't NOT email him so I did that over the weekend. Getting the card made me wonder though, I thought I had set up a way to contact me through the blog. When I got home I took a look at my blog settings and realized that the layout and theme I had chosen when I updated the blog, were not compatible with all the added stuff I had chosen! So I had to redo the theme and layout AGAIN. So I'm sure you noticed that the layout and theme have changed yet again. But now all the stuff works like I want it to!
If anyone needs to contact me in any way, please use the contact form to the right! It works, I swear (i tested it to make double sure!) and all messages get forwarded to my own personal email.

 Now onto some fun stuff, aka progress photos.

I snapped a quick selfie after my brackets were removed but before the new ones were replaced. It gave me a good sense of what my teeth will look like once they are off forever.

These are my models! The yellow ones are the most recent and the white ones are the very first models I took back in 2014. You can really see how different my teeth and jaws are now. The bottom models are my top teeth jaws and the top models are my bottom teeth jaws.

Really crappy morning teeth selfie. 

My next appointment is in May to have (you guessed it) more impressions done. Hahaha. I don't need to see Dr. Klein at this appointment though. I'll see her again the first week in June for another adjustment. So 2 upcoming appointments!