2020 Update

Well it's February 2020. Almost 3 years in, and still no idea when I'm getting these damn things off. So here's some updates over the past 7 months or so.

1) Got married in September. The pictures actually turned out not too bad, and in most of the pictures, you can't even tell I have braces.

2) 6 weeks prior to leading up to the wedding, I told my ortho that since they wouldn't be off in time for the wedding, if they could take the bands off the right canine and straighten everything out and then start pulling again after the wedding. It had come in a little bit at this point. So she obliged. Problem turned up when we started pulling again. The tooth just would not move. So I went back to the perio/oral surgeon again. He tapped on the tooth, said it should still move and wasn't too concerned. When I went back to the ortho, we tried again. Still wouldn't move. Had to go back to the oral surgeon again. This time, he said he needed to cut into my gum again to poke some holes into the bone that had grown up around the tooth stopping it from moving. This would allow it to move again. So I just got that done on Jan 24th and he put a couple of dissolvable stitches in. Joy. I went back to the ortho on Jan 28th for her to look at it and she said to just use the gazelle ortho rubber bands to connect the button on the canine to the lower arch and change them several times a day. Meanwhile, the oral surgeon wanted me to go back for a followup, which I did yesterday. He said the tooth has moved and is still moving and it's going great. He gave me a different size rubber band and said to use that instead for 4 hours a day, because it would apply more force and the idea was to bring the tooth into place fairly quickly. So hopefully (fingers crossed), once it's in, all that's left to do is straighten everything across and then the braces can come off and I get a retainer.

3) There is one thing that I was told that could throw a wrench into the current plans. The ortho took some x-rays in November and said that I will need x-rays every 3 months to check for resorption of my roots because the roots had resorbed a little bit. Apparently, as the two canines come in, it resorbs some of the nearby roots. If they get too resorbed, my teeth can become loose and fall out. So they will need to monitor that. If it gets to the point that we don't want to risk my teeth falling out due to the roots resorbing too much, then all braces treatment would need to immediately stop, be removed and switch to Invisalign. Ugh! That would mean a bunch of more money I would need to pay to finish the job. The ortho said that there is zero risk with Invisalign resorbing the roots because the technology is advanced. So there's that.

Current situation: I'm waiting on those stitches to fully dissolve. The left canine is fully in, with a bracket and connected like the rest of the teeth (just not all pulled together tight yet). The right canine is moving and we are on track to bring it in, finally. Fingers crossed that no more issues pop up.