Take out your fucking retainer, put it in your purse

[sovay]

I've had to get a year's worth of braces because the alternative was my teeth grinding into one another at angles that were causing them to splinter and would necessitate things like crowns and lots of composite if not realigned. The effects of this on my daily life are substantially nastier than I was led to believe and I don't know what the adjustment period is going to be like. Things inside my head are kind of terrible right now.

Hana Vojáčková's Milk & Sea. I think I love best the Icelandic mermaid with her trout-silver tail and the rill of turf-breaking rock that looks like a stream, but there is something about the German mermaid waiting for her bus, or maybe just watching the nighttime, commercial sea, that is a story all in one frame. I shouldn't write it before I write something with trees. Right now I am having trouble believing I will ever write anything, full stop.

Comments

[sovay]

because teeth whitening has been such a trend lately (and is something they try to upsell, because it's a big profit-driver for dentists).

I was offered free whitening at the end of my treatment. I asked if it was going to be necessary: if the composite attachments were going to leave marks on the enamel, for example. No, the dentist said, most people just want it.

And cared more about having good looking teeth than functional teeth that I use to eat and drink things?

Well, yes, that. The whole rationale for beginning this process was functional teeth.

For that matter, he might mean the invisalign stained.

I need a lot more information than I was given when I left the dentist's office, despite asking. (As today: I called back to ask what to do about the fact that the spaces where my back teeth were filed apart to make room for tooth movement are viciously cold-sensitive, heat-sensitive, and cannot be flossed or brushed without pain flashing up the side of my face, not to mention bleeding, and was told that was normal. I repeated the temperature sensitivity, which I associate with exposed root, not tender gums. I was told to call back after the weekend if it persisted, with the clear implication that I was overreacting and it would go away. If so, it would have been nice to be given some advance warning that inhaling cold air and taking a shower would give me a headache. I am not impressed with their aftercare.)

[rinue.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I love dentists - I have extreme respect for the profession and think it has done an extraordinary amount for human wellbeing - but there can be a tendency to view the mouth as an impressive machine. Which it is - enamel is kind of incredible in terms of strength and resiliency. Not a lot can match it. To get harder, you almost have to go diamond. Yet the mouth is also the place where nerves are more pain-sensing than literally anywhere else in the body, unless I am mistaken.

So you have this machine that can handle almost anything, with an electrical system running through it that is hypersensitive to the slightest shift. And the machine is the part that's visible to the dentists; the pain isn't. As a result:

1. They assume everybody is overreacting when something is painful, because the nerves there really do send off false alarms. Only sometimes they're not false.

2. They tend not to prescribe painkillers or anaesthesia if they can avoid it, because these things are dangerous in ways that implicate the provider, whereas pain danger can be blamed on the body of the patient.

[sovay]

2. They tend not to prescribe painkillers or anaesthesia if they can avoid it, because these things are dangerous in ways that implicate the provider, whereas pain danger can be blamed on the body of the patient.

I took my own codeine in order to sleep (three hours) that night. The dentist didn't even ask if I wanted anything for the pain. I might have said no anyway, but I was so shell-shocked, I didn't even notice till later.