Queen of the Closed-mouth Smile - Dollard-des-ormeaux, QC

I'm also the procrastinator queen; as you can see I am now approximately halfway through!
Where to begin? Perhaps with the little girl whose baby teeth refused to go before the real ones started coming in, resulting in one snaggletooth, followed by the young adult whose wisdom teeth caused no other problems except for ultimate crowding, and whose teeth in general (trips to the dentist were not a part of my growing up years) were cavity-prone. So much so that a couple of the teeth in the left side of my mouth were extracted as I was in a lot of pain and apparently "nothing could be done to save them". Shortly after, I found a good dentist who was able to save the ones on the right side, which were equally problematic. Needless to say, I since had bi-yearly visits to my dentist.
Fast forward a few years and the 57 year-old me found herself with crooked top and bottom teeth, a cross-and-slightly open bite, and a feeling that there wasn't enough space in my mouth for my tongue. Shredding my floss was becoming a pastime, and I could easily amuse people with stories of different types of flossers which ended up stuck in my teeth. Not a pretty sight.
So, I finally decided to bite the proverbial bullet, (fear of periodontal disease as well as fear of the people aiming a camera at me and telling me to smile- not like that- with your mouth open! What???!!!! - no!!!!) and here I am, my teeth cocooned in plastic, (which I tend to suck at and bite on constantly-Urgh) and on my way ( I hope) to oral health and voluntary selfies!
To be continued... In chapter two of this saga I will try to condense the experience of the first few months of the little suckers which have taken over my mouth.

.....and googling invisalign to death....I finally decided to go through with the procedure. My family dentist has done oodles of procedures and has albums of before and after shots in his office, so when I found out he also had the itero scanner (bonus! No gagging) I booked the appointment. My happy was short- lived however. The iTero is not for people "blessed" with small mouths. The thing they used to keep my mouth stretched open was something straight out of the torture chambers of yore. To top it all off, after doing a luttle more than half of my mouth, we realized that the machine could not account for the two missing teeth on the left bottom of my mouth. So after all that work and discomfort, he removed the instrument of torture from my mouth and went straight to the job of doing the molds the old-fashioned way. I have to hand it to him as I'm sure it was no picnic for him to start all over, either, but he did it with almost no discomfort, and in one take. Phew. When the trays came in, I was sooo apprehensive; how many trays? (38- say what?.!) how many attachments (18 - some teeth - even front ones - with more than one on each tooth- aaaaackkkk!!!) how would they feel? The 38 trays was bad enough, having been given an estimate of 9 months to a year, but the 18 attachments was almost a deal breaker. Except I had already given a down payment. Smart man, my dentist. So on went my first aligner, my kit went into a bag with aligner 2, some chewies (grape or orange) and a child's toothbrush to clean my aligners with (tweety bird or taz) and off I went to sit in my car, making calculations......38 sets, switching out every two weeks, mumble, gasp, grumble....and don't tell me you didn't do the same thing (those if you who have already started). I CAN HAVE TWO BABIES IN THE AMOUNT OF TIME IT WOULD TAKE THESE BABUES TO STRAIGHTEN OUT MY MOUTH! Gulp.... Chapter three.....aligners and the common cold....the stuff nightmares are made of.

After great trepidation, I managed (to my pleasant surprise) to get my second aligner snapped into my mouth without much effort. The only discomfort came a day later when I got a piercing headache, something rare for me. I took a Tylenol and it skulked away...
The other thing I noticed is that I was prone to licking my lips. A lot. And suddenly, I needed a lot more water than I normally drank. I also had a section on my right back molar that didn't seem to sit tight. It was squishy, which made me want to bite down on it constantly. All this I felt I could live with, maybe; probably;hopefully. Enter the common cold.
Suffice it to say that wearing invisalign when you have a cold is downright unpleasant. Blowing your nose with those suckers in your mouth is uncomfortable to say the least. Your braces fill with air and you feel like they are going to snap right out of your mouth. Not being able to breath through said nose though, is a thousand times worse.. Remember what I said about constantly licking my lips and needing water? That's because your mouth gets dry. Well, when you breathe with your mouth open, guess what happens? Your mouth shrivels and dies, that's what. Oh yeah. So much so in my case, that I developed something called Angular Chelitis. (Yeah, say that with a mouthful of trays) what is that, you ask? You get cracks in the corner of your mouth, extremely painful, and they have a tendency to spread. I first I thought I had developed a cold sore, as I sometimes get those. However, these were lesions, not bumps, and they are more or less vertical, sort of like deep paper cuts ( did I hear an ouch? Told you they were painful - now imagine your paper cut spreading. There- you get it.)in any case, I started googling like a madwoman, thinking that I had perhaps developed the dreaded invisalign allergy, and looking for assorted cures. After using practically everything in my medicine chest including some herbal stuff to no avail, I finally paid a visit to my doctor who confirmed the cholitis, gave me a topical cream, told me to keep the rest of my lips slathered in Vaseline ( I stiil do this, I like the little pots with cocoa butter and have even have one in the car.) and poo-poo'd my fears of invisalign allergy being the culprit. Trauma is usually the cause of this, made worse by stress, and dry mouth. So yeah, the invisalign played a part as it is often dental procedures that bring it on (see my first post regarding the extreme mouth stretch exercise) and then the dry mouth extremes due to my cold added to the stress of the first few weeks of trays and being sick at the same time.....
When I went back to my dentist for my button-thingies and tray 3, my mouth was still in awful shape. He said he had never seen the condition before, although he had certainly heard of it. Needless to say, he DID NOT use the mouth stretching torture implement to button me up. That, by the way, was long but not painful.
With my new tray snapped on for posterity ( at least that's what it felt like) and 2 more in my purse, I made my way home to stare at my buttoned teeth in privacy. no way about it, they were no longer totally in usable but, having said that, after all these months I still have to tell people that I am wearing braces.
The colitis? Cleared up totally in about two weeks, never to return. Vaseline is my buddy.
Next chapter - In Trays we Trust - living with it