I'm a 35 year old female living in the great state of Texas, Austin to be exact. I have 2 impacted canines. I've searched on the internet for information on how others got through the process and I have not found anything. So I guess it's up to me to start a blog so I can tell my story and hopefully help others who are in the same boat.
How did I get here? Well when I was kid, the dentist I was seeing knew I had impacted canines. He said as long as they didn't bother me (which they didn't) that I didn't need to do anything about it. I actually wish that was NOT the advice given, but I cannot move backward. If I had gotten it corrected then, I wouldn't be in the situation I am in now. So I have made the hard decision to move forward and finally get my teeth fixed.
What led me to that decision? Two years ago, I visited the dentist and was told that I had a cavity in the only two baby teeth I still had left (my adult canines never erupted and the baby teeth stayed put for 33 years.) It was going to be pointless to put a filling in baby teeth since they were not meant to last that long anyway. So at that point in time, I made the decision to have those two baby canine teeth extracted. I visited the orthodontist for the first time in December 2015 for a consultation and cost estimate. Yikes! I was told that in order to bring my 2 adult teeth into place, I had no other option but a full set of braces. I actually went to two different ortho's and was told the same thing. The cost was going to be high. At that time, I really wasn't making enough money to where I could really afford the cost. So I made the decision to delay doing anything at that point. Now I wish I had just done it then. But I digress. The important thing is I finally made the decision to move forward.
Fast forward to July 2016. I switched my dental insurance plan to begin on September 1 in order to receive a 25% discount on the orthodontic work. September comes and goes and new insurance plan goes into effect. (I'm still delaying at this point. Why? Mainly because I'm scared.) October turns into April 2017. Alright, at this point I went back to the same orthodontist for another consultation. The cost ended up remaining the same. I was given 3 options to correct the problem.
1. Do nothing and accept any and all risks of impacted canines including the possibility that they will fuse to the bone and have to be surgically extracted later on.
2. Attempt orthodontics and try to bring them down into their correct positions. If that doesn't work, then implants and crowns.
3. Skip the ortho work and go straight to implants/crowns.
Mind you, I DO NOT WANT braces. At all. So I asked for a referral to inquire about the process and cost for implants and crowns.
I went to the periodontist a week or so later. After speaking with him, he told me he could do the work to bring the teeth into position that would include lifting up the gum, exposing the tooth, attaching a bracket to the tooth, and a chain that would hook into the main arch wire. It would require stitches. Once I heal from the stitches, they could start slowly applying pressure to the canines by pulling them down. It's a process that takes time and doesn't happen overnight. I could do the implants but it's a lot more invasive and a lot more money, but less time overall. My biggest worry in all of this is spending all this money out of pocket knowing it could be for nothing if the teeth are fused to the bone in the end. I expressed this to him. He was able to get me in for a CT scan (basically a 3D xray) at no cost to me to physically see where the teeth are and if they are fused to the bone. I went in at the end of the month for the scan. A week or so later, the perio informed me that my teeth are actually in my sinuses, so they are basically hitting on dead air. That's why they never erupted because there was no force or pressure to pull them into place. Apparently impacted canines are a pretty common problem. The best news of all was that in his opinion, they didn't appear to be fused to the bone and should move once I get the braces put on and the brackets to move them down into place.
So I went ahead and made my first actual appointment with the orthodontist in May 2017 to officially get started.
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