What Getting Braces at 28 Taught Me About Life
When I was 13, I could usually be found pacing the aisles of my local Walgreens wearing smiley-face Limited Too bellbottoms, reading the Alyssa Milano issue of Cosmopolitan, my mouth full of dental appliances. I'm 28 now, but I've been transported back to that time: I am an adult with braces.
I was born with an underbite and went through a series of retainers that I kept accidentally discarding in cafeteria trashcans throughout middle school. One of them came with two fake teeth that fit over my own front incisors; others glowed in the dark or were cast with glitter. My personal favorite was the "palate expander" - an appliance that widens the jaw by way of a crank. It was a modern-day form of medieval torture. I got braces at the end of seventh grade (age 12); I can't remember how long I had them on that first time - blame it on the beautiful naiveté of teenage youth. My experience with adult braces, in comparison, has been far more poignant (though perhaps more so for bartenders than for me).
About five years ago, I was told that I needed to correct my underbite. My teeth were stacked "end to end" and were wearing themselves down; without treatment I'd be looking at major reconstruction of fractured front teeth by my early 30s. After a lifetime of orthodontics, the only option was surgery. Not the kind where they break your jaw in half and you have to drink milkshakes through a straw for six weeks (which a Chicago-based orthodontist urged me to get in 2010), the kind where they saw in between every tooth so the bones of your mouth are like those double-jointed marionettes from The Sound of Music. I put off the surgery for years until I found the right orthodontists for the job: a pair of Southern gentlemen whose offices felt straight off the set of Twin Peaks.
Dr. Green and Dr. Knight, based out of Louisville, Kentucky, are one of the few dental teams in the country to perform dentoalveolar distraction osteogenesis, an accelerated process (mine took eight months total) that is far less invasive than the "eat through a straw" surgery I'd been initially prescribed. DDO is far from experimental (my team has practiced the procedure for 11 years) but newer than its broken jaw frenemy; with fewer DDO trainings at orthodontic residency programs as well as the need for the surgeon/orthodontist partnership, its climb to popularity has been slow but steady. Dr. Green - a close family friend - had been urging me toward DDO for as many Thanksgivings as I can remember, but signing on meant that I'd be going through the worst of it in Louisville (birthplace of my mom and home to my grandparents).
Had I fully thought through my decision - more than 10 round-trips between New York and Kentucky in 2015, my severe pain compounded by the change in cabin pressure - I might have been dissuaded. But once I met Dr. Knight (the orthodontist that would later prescribe me kid-friendly rubber bands with animal names like "Fiji" and "Impala") and saw the computer-generated "after" photos of my soon-to-be mouth, I decided it was time.
So, last summer, I, a mature adult two years shy of missing all "30 under 30" competitions, was gifted with a full mouth of braces. Based on the "marionette-jaw" I earlier described, I had to get the braces on right before the surgery because they would literally hold my mouth in place (!). My dentists warned me that there would be "some discomfort and mild swelling," which I took to mean a few days post-surgery. I was excited to get some writing done, chill at my grandparents' house, and be waited on hand and foot by my mom.
In reality, my face was packed in ice that was switched out in constant rotation for the week, and I didn't leave the house for five days. A good friend of mine said I looked like a body that had been found at the bottom of the ocean. My mouth was full of stitches, swollen so much that I could barely speak, and chewed up from the newly installed braces. It hurt like hell, if hell was being run over by a train wrapped in barbed wire.
I took hydrocodone and Tylenol 3, but a few days of narcotics made me feel as dizzy as a 1960s housewife. I eventually braved the pain and supplemented with acetaminophen; all anti-inflammatory medications were off the table because in the case of my recovery, swelling was "a good thing" (several studies have shown that these drugs may actually prevent recovery by impeding the enzymes and inflammatory responses that help bones heal themselves).
I spent the second half of June recovering in Louisville, finally returning back to Brooklyn with sunglasses over my face and a true understanding of the best ice packs available on the market (I considered starting an "ice pack blog" but the pain pills made it hard to type full sentences). Having boarded my flight home, I slouched dejectedly with my drug- and dental care-filled backpack in my lap. The teenage girl sitting next to me gestured to my bag and explained the purpose of the overhead compartment, using a nurturing voice meant to soothe and reassure. Between the braces and the puffy baby face, I realized, I looked like an unaccompanied minor.
I had already prepared most of the people in my life for my change in appearance, warning friends that they'd be taken for mentors, kidnappers, cradle robbers, and creepy uncles by anyone who saw us hanging out. I was mostly faced with sympathetic moans of dismay and stories of their own teenage orthodontic journeys. But for some reason, I never felt concerned about how I was going to look with braces. I even looked forward to it a little bit.
I think it was mainly the artist in me getting excited for my off-the-grid fashion statement (Did I mention I live in New York?). Apart from the fact that I was going to be living with a jail inside my mouth - preventing me from giving blow jobs and eating popcorn - a world of comedy opened itself up to me, thanks to the braces.
A few weeks after the surgery, my face had healed enough so that I no longer looked like a battered Cabbage Patch kid. I started making videos about the "Adults With Braces" that lived inside of me. There was the barely legal Louisville teen hoping to use her veterinary passions to make it big in New York City. There was the gender-curious extreme hiker who was the "lead surgeon" on her own surgery after a tragic rock climbing accident. There was unstable 32-year-old #blessed Hannah who had clearly "gone through some shit" and was trying to heal, one tear at a time. I had school photos taken of all of these smiling alter egos and started doing live performances as Trude Donovan, a former attorney turned young-adult novelist who got braces as a form of method acting. Braces were bringing me more laughs that I'd been having before.
Don't get me wrong; there were plenty of weird and painful side effects from my metal mouth. Mixologists served me drinks begrudgingly. Flossing with braces is only possible for those descended from a long lineage of artisanal weavers. I was constantly starving; the rubber bands caused so much pain that I usually preferred foods that could be swallowed without chewing (Did you know that it's possible to drink macaroni and cheese?) Dental work is no cheap affair. Even though a mouth full of braces screams: "I take care of my health at any cost!" the cost in this case is several thousand dollars without dental insurance (which was still cheaper than the cost of having to replace all of my teeth 10 years from now).
Downfalls aside, the process of wearing the equivalent of a cast on my face for the better part of 2015 was one of the more empowering things I've bumbled through in my adulthood. By making extreme discomfort extremely comfortable - smiling bigger in photos than I ever had, hoping the sun would send a glare off of my mouth - I found myself better able to relate and connect to the people around me, both strangers and friends. By looking my weirdest and owning it, I felt some form of my best.
We all have good days where we feel super perfect and healthy and cleaned up, but there's something wildly empowering about feeling confident on an off day. In fact, my braces made me realize there aren't really on days or off days - there are just the days you laugh a bunch and the days you don't. And laughing with braces on is really fun; flashing my medically necessary bling gives off a hilarious yet unhinged vibe that can only be described as uncanny. Crying isn't half bad either: Weeping with braces makes me feel like a blubbering tween experiencing her first dose of adolescent heartbreak, so it's hard to take myself seriously for too long. In the end, surviving a second puberty has been a small price to pay for the perfect smile and an epic selfie or two.
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