Vanity Bites
When I was a kid, I had a rogue tooth. It was determined to hide behind the tooth next to it, and throughout the ‘70s I underwent a series of orthodontic procedures that came straight from the Medieval Procedures R’ Us catalog. At one point I swear I had a tiny pulley system installed on that one tooth, operated by a tiny medieval torturer who cranked it once a day, then drank mead and read jousting literature. There was enough going on in my mouth during the preteen years that when the whole tooth grill phenomenon caught on three decades later, I could at least call myself a trendsetter.
Eventually the tooth was tamed, but for a little bit of an angle that only I ever saw. In early adulthood, having thrown out the retainer that would have frozen it in the right place for the rest of my life, I’d joke, “It’ll make it easier to identify my corpse from dental records!”
Here’s something fun I’ve learned about aging! Your jaw gets smaller! And your wonky tooth gets wonkier! So in the past five years, that tooth has turned shy again and is trying to hide behind its neighbor tooth. My “dental records” joke got less and less funny, at least to me. And my kids finished up their own BraceFace journeys with the local orthodontic practice that is the single most pleasant, efficient, and friendly place I have ever spent time. I was starting to miss Dr. R and his waiting room of well-stocked magazines and on-time dentistry.
But mostly, I am vain. The wonky tooth was starting to be the only thing I ever noticed when I looked at pictures of myself. So this week, I got Invisalign.
This is not a sponsored post, though I wish it were to help me offset some of the cost of what I just committed myself to. This is just me telling you that my teeth are now wearing tiny plastic straitjackets and I’m about to starve to death, 22 hours at a time.
I am the first to admit that I didn’t do much – really, any – research about what Invisalign would involve before signing up. I had a vague sense that it was a series of invisible magic trays that you slipped over your teeth, barely perceptible to anyone but the wearer, and that at the end of some to-be-determined-but-surely-not-too-long time period, your grown-up teeth would look perfect again. I could simply take them off to eat, drink, and be merry when having them in was inconvenient– isn’t that what Adult Braces should be?
The first clue I had maybe underestimated my commitment was when lovely Deb at my lovely ortho practice said, “Ok, I’m going to be applying anchors to your teeth” and then came at me with some high tech purple adhesive and plastic. Ten minutes later I had knobs attached everywhere in my mouth, small and tooth-colored. I imagine the tiny torturer of my youth could have used them for recreational rock climbing. Deb explained that the invisible trays attach to the knobs, so while the trays are in fact invisible, it looks like there are baby corn kernels clinging for safety to the surface of my teeth.
Then Deb slipped the first week’s trays on. Have you ever shopped at a discount store and grabbed something from the rack displaying your size, only to pull the garment on in the dressing room and realize it was a Petite XS that someone had filed wrong? Only now it’s stuck over your head and you might never get out of it? That’s my teeth in these trays. Deb made me pull the trays on and off my teeth a few times to be sure I could do it. I’ve never wished for a third hand so fervently in my life. And every week, when they start to fit a little more loosely, there’s a new size Petite XS to force over them.
Which is where starvation enters the picture. I’m supposed to keep these in 22 hours a day, and I can’t eat when the trays are in, unless you count “drink only cool water” as eating, and if you do, let’s not be friends. It’s only this week that I realized I’m putting food and beverage down my piehole at least eight hours a day. Popping the trays on and off insouciantly for my mid-morning dark chocolate snack or late afternoon whatever’s-in-the-pantry snack won’t happen without that third hand. So I have to figure out how to concentrate my nutrition intake time down by 75%, and work over the rumblings of my hangry stomach.
This morning, I shotgunned the amount of coffee I normally space out over the whole morning plus slammed down a breakfast sandwich as fast as I could, half awake. It left me jittery, but with enough time for a 15-minute lunch and 20-minute dinner. You’d like to think this whole thing would be a good diet aid – no snacking! – but I can already see traces of what my friend Jenny, an Invisalign graduate, warned would happen. “You think you’ll lose weight, but what happens is that you are so hungry by the time you take them off that you’ll eat 6,000 calorie meals.” Burp.
When the girls first got their braces I would say to them, “It’s just going to take some adjustment. It will all be worth it.” Now that they have perfect teeth, and I’m the one in braces, I have a new admonishment:
NEVER THROW OUT YOUR RETAINERS.
Sometimes the perfect song comes at the perfect time – like when I heard “Miracle Aligner” for the first time on the way home from the ortho. If you think The Last Shadow Puppets sound like the Arctic Monkeys it’s only because they share the same lead singer, Alex Turner.
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