On a mission to have a nice smile :D

Early in December, I got serious about getting my teeth fixed because I was tired of having severely crowded teeth give me an ugly smile. I feel like at 22 years old and in my prime, I shouldn't have to be ashamed of any part of myself, so I'll take action and get whatever I'm upset about now while I'm still feeling somewhat young HA!

For most of my self-conscious life I've been bothered mainly by two things: my weight and my teeth. The weight issue I've been dealing with pretty well for the past year, and hopefully I'll be at my goal size by the time summer rolls around. However....getting my teeth straightened is a much more time-consuming, expensive, and serious matter. So I went around the Northern Virginia area for several orthodontic consultations. Why did I visit so many? Because I wanted to compare the doctor's opinions, their employees/office atmosphere, prices, and the different treatment plans.

I ended up deciding to stay local to my Alexandria/Annandale area and went with Dr. Michael Ellis. So 2 days ago on Monday, January 5th... I went in for my appointment at 11am to get my brace brackets and spacers on. Valeria, the dental assistant who was prepping me to get the brackets on, asked me if I wanted ceramic or metal, and well..I decided to go with metal. I figure if I get braces, people are going to know I'm going to have them on anyways. So there is no reason for me to try and somewhat conceal that or try to make it look more aesthetically pleasing. Oh yeah, I also decided to get hot pink ties on...which was a decision I instantly regretted, seeing as how I felt about 12 years old as soon as I saw my teeth in the mirror, haha.

Over the past couple days, my teeth have been incredibly sore and I've limited myself to eating basically yogurt, jello, soup, rice porridge, and mashed potatoes. I feel so deprived of eating (which is something I LOVE doing and I do it OH SO extraordinarily well) and don't know what to do with myself. I've also been loading up on aspirin, but I'll be trying to lay off that sometime soon.

Things I have to look forward to for the rest of this month? Well, on the 19th I go back to get my spacers replaced, and then on the 26th I get my wires & metal bands placed in. The pain from the upcoming appointments is supposed to dwarf my bracket soreness..so I'm not excited about any of that.

My good friend Nick brought up the idea of me keeping a journal/log with photos of my epic battle against orthodontic destruction and so here I am, posting about what I've been up too. So hopefully I'll be keeping up-to-date about making logs to show my progress. I'll also be uploading a few photos within the next few days to show how my 2 year journey will be starting out!

Toodles, Binna.

EDIT: Here is how my teeth looked when I got my brackets, hot pink ties, and spacers in :)

Photos taken on 1-5-2009 & 1-19-2009 respectively.
(I brightened the photos a bit so you can't really tell how in-your-face pink the ties were... but I assure you they were! The blue spacers in the latter photo are also harder to see.)