I Tried Adult Braces and This Is What Happened
I never had braces as a kid, and as teeth go, mine were fine. Sure, my two front teeth were kind of big and I had a slightly crooked one on the bottom row, but it never bothered me. I'd never had a cavity until I gave birth to my first kid and then... I had, like, 6. Then, after I had my second kid, my teeth shifted. No one would tell me for sure that this was a cause-and-effect situation, but I totally blame Baby #2 for my bite being all jacked up.
So when Invisalign offered to set me up with their plastic aligner system and one of the top orthodontists in the country, who was I to say no? Especially since the average course of treatment runs around $6K.
Meeting my orthodonist
I met Dr. Joseph Hung at his Rockefeller Center office in New York City and immediately liked him. With his man-bun, perfect row of pearly whites, and extreme enthusiasm for all things orthodontics, I pictured him as the kind of person who would go to those morning raves all the kids in Brooklyn are talking about these days. (And hey, who knows? The next time you're at a 6 a.m. dance party, look to your left and you may just find a Harvard-educated doctor joyfully chugging a green juice mocktail.)
This guy has seen it all, since he's been working with Invisalign since the very beginning-he's in the company's "Century Club" (read: among the top 100 Invisalign Orthodontists in North America) and he builds all of his own molds in-house using 3D scans. Dr. Hung told me I didn't have to have a ton done, so he prescribed an approximately one-year course of treatment (harder cases take longer). Though, he did mention something to me about having a narrow palate, and that the only way to fix it would be to CUT MY JAW OPEN. Obviously, that wasn't going to happen (nor was he recommending it). I decided to file that under problems and solutions I never needed to know existed.
Day 1: Slurring my way through a celebrity interview
Here's the deal: I would get a new clear plastic aligner every two weeks. It covers your teeth completely, so you can't eat with them in (or chew gum). Each one would shift my teeth ever so slightly until I finally reached straight-teeth nirvana. "You MUST wear these 22 hours a day," he said. "If you don't, you can't achieve your goals." I'm a goody-goody and I took his rule to heart. Afterward, I headed back to the office to do a celebrity interview over the phone. Because duh. It's an excellent idea to schedule something that requires talking immediately after putting a straightjacket on your teeth for the first time.
"Ssssssoooooo, howsssss filming your new sssssseriessssss been?" I lisp into the receiver as a droplet of drool hits my keyboard. I'm panicking and silently hyperventilating through the celeb's responses to my stuttered questions. After several minutes of torture, I apologize and explain to her why I sound like Elmer Fudd. "Oh my goodness!" she exclaims. "I've always had a snaggle tooth I don't like and I'm getting Invisalign next week." After that, we're fast friends and she even follows up with me a few months later to report that she loves her Invisalign and can sing with it in. Showoff. (Oh, and other celebrities have used Invisalign, too, like Justin Bieber. And we all know that the nicest thing about the Biebs is his teeth.)
A few days in...
The next couple of days are torture, just like Dr. Hung said they would be. The aligners are sharp. I file the edges down a bit and things improve slightly, though it feels like there's something huge in my mouth. My pillow is soaked in drool when I wake up, I don't want to eat (truly a first for me), and I'm feeling pretty miserable. And then suddenly, it clicks. By day 3, the braces have been downgraded to merely annoying. I'm getting the hang of it; the lisp has subsided and I can open my mouth without feeling too self-conscious most of the time.
But how do I eat with this thing in?
Now, there's this apocryphal story that people lose weight when they have Invisalign because the aligners are basically too much of a pain in the butt to take out to eat. One of my coworkers lived on smoothies and drank hot coffee through a straw. No thanks. My tack was slightly different. Instead, I'd wait for something really good to come along and then I'd hoover in 3,000 calories worth of it.
Generally, I was good about passing up food that really wasn't worth taking out my Invisalign for. And looking back, maybe the one time to break that rule shouldn't have been in a breakfast meeting with a bunch of top editors. I was starving, and even I, with my very limited sense of decorum, knew I couldn't take out my aligners in front of all of those Louboutins. So instead, I systematically dissected a mini muffin, balling it into ¼-inch pieces, and then ever-so-carefully launching each one as far back into my throat as possible...thereby killing any chance of upward mobility at this company. BUT HEY, MY TEETH ARE STRAIGHT NOW!
And forget alcohol. With my 22-hour-brace-wearing-quota to meet, I no longer had a half-hour to savor a cocktail. I either wouldn't drink at all, or I'd pound a beer like a frat boy (leaving me with1 hour and 58 minutes of retainer-free time in my day). Since coffee, wine, and other staining beverages were out, I drank a lot more water. But one day I passed a fancy coffee house and my eyes skimmed over the chalkboard special: chai latte with cinnamon, turmeric, cloves, hipster, fancy, blah, blah, blah. Sign me up! I happily sipped my chai (through a straw) and then got to work and looked in the mirror…and my aligners were Day-Glo yellow with turmeric stains. No amount of scrubbing would get the color out, and I was thankful I only had to wait two weeks before I got fresh, clear set of new aligners.
Orthodontia is not for the weak
I visited Dr. Hung every couple of months and he'd make a few tweaks here and there. He would also sometimes file my teeth (called an occlusal adjustment), which is exactly the kind of fresh hell it sounds like. He would take an extremely thin metal file and adjust the size of certain teeth that were rubbing or bumping in the wrong way. It only took a minute or two, but they were those every-second-is-an-hour types of minutes and I never got used to the sensation. Even thinking back on it gives me the heeby jeebies. It's not so hellacious that I wouldn't do Invisalign all over again, but it's just above breaking my wrist on the list of fun times I wish I'd never had.
I'll need to wear night retainers for the rest of my life (my coffee-sipping coworker didn't wear them, and now her teeth have shifted back) and clean them with Polident, which leads to some strange looks in the pharmacy.
I can see the finish line!
You know how they describe childhood as the longest shortest time? This was kind of like that too. One minute I was brushing my teeth a million times a day and always knowing where my Invisalign case was (except when I once, and only once, threw it in the trash at a fast food place and had to dive in and dig it out). The next minute Dr. Hung was buffing off the little attachments that secured the aligners in place (which, by the way, smells like burning but is nowhere near as intense as the occlusal adjustment). And suddenly, just like that, a bright, slightly straighter- toothed future lay before me.
