sovay | Take out your fucking retainer, put it in your purse

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Take out your fucking retainer, put it in your purse

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.

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I had braces for 4+ years as a consequence of mostly not getting dental care until 8th grade. You have my sympathies. :-/

Ouch. That sounds unpleasant. Have you had orthodontia before?

Oh dear. Tooth-grinding/clenching is a thing I have experience with; do you want to talk about it?

You made my day better by linking to that transcript of Pete Seger in the previous entry. It actually had an excellent answer to a situation I was helping with elsewhere, and gave some comfort to people who needed it.

I hope the dental work is nowhere near as dreadful as you fear. I have braces coping strategies for you if it is dreadful (did they give you dental wax? If not, poke me and I will tell you about it, and also about the merits of easily obtained numbing agents, like Orajel.)

I had three years of braces followed by extreme jaw surgery (both jaws broken and reset) followed by 5 years of maintenance, so I am something of an old hand at getting around the stupidity of braces and other dental appliances, and what one has to do to keep them from staining your teeth.

I love the bus waiting mermaid best, but that is perhaps because I spent so much of my youth waiting for buses.

Damn about the braces. I know they will prevent all sorts of pain and poverty down the line, but they hurt *NOW*. Ouch. Sympathy.

The German mermaid's wet sidewalk looks like the river of blood in "Thomas the Rhymer."

Nine

Damn. Damn, I'm sorry. *hugs if wanted*

I love the bus-stop mermaid, also the one in the snow.

You'll write again. I have faith.

Sorry to hear it.

Perhaps I'm being too literal about this, but I can't help wondering how the mermaid is going to get onto and off the bus.

I'm sorry about the braces! Was there a particular reason for the Invisalign? (Other than that it's the usual thing for adults, because they usually don't want to be bracefaces.)

Dear gods, that isn't even fair - that crossing your sight. As excited as I am by the process of your forest, those pictures are downright taunting you.

Also, holy crap, that sounds terrible (I read the logistical difficulties with simply eating). I offer hugs as hugs might be needed.

I'm so sorry to hear this. I wish you swift improvement with the orthodontic situation and all the rest. *hugs*, if you'd wish to have them.

Thanks for sharing the mermaids. I wonder if her sitting in that German bus stop is in any way a similar act to diving such as might be done by one of our land-based kind.

Edited 2014-01-31 03:32 (UTC)

Never had orthodonture. so I can only imagine what you're going thru and it sounds miserable. One does get used to hanging by one's thumbs... just get thru each day and let the year take care of itself. And don't forget about soup as a source of hydration and calories in the winter.

If you can't write about trees, write about teeth. Teeth that look like trees.

I'm sorry to hear about the braces. Braces can be painful, but the problems with eating sound especially miserable.

You will write again.

I would rather be a toothless crone, and indeed no doubt I shall be. But when I am I shall think of all the posts I have read from Americans on LJ about this kind of torture, and I will gum my soup and be content.

I hope you find a quiet corner in your mind that you can pull around yourself like a true comforter.

I like the mermaids' sweaters. I suppose they wash them in cold water.

Stuff happening in the mouth is a particular form of torture--which is why it gets used as a particular form of torture.

Doctors also inveterately underestimate the pain and disruption something will cause :-(

Of course you will write something. You have been amazing in the last three months. Little Wittgenstein may want to tell you you never will write again, but little Spock must say that logically speaking, the trend is quite to the contrary.

I'm so sorry this is happening to you. I'm especially sorry it's happening when you didn't expect it.

I don't know if this will be of any help to you, but my experience of dentists has been that they cannot understand the concept of herbal teas and tisanes. It's like dental school knocks previous knowledge out of their heads and replaces it with the idea that "tea" is always a very hot, very dark brown, liquid containing lots of tannic acid. If a patient says they're talking about "not regular caffeinated tea, just something herbal like mint tea," that somehow translates to chemically-decaffeinated black tea flavored with mint. So I don't think you need to worry about herbal teas (even if the dentist was not exaggerating the problem, as others have suggested.)

It may be possible to drink with a straw with the aligners in. At the very least, you could take the aligners out, drink a cup of goats milk or tea with honey, rinse with a mouthful of water, and put the aligners back in. I think some of that very emphatic "floss immediately after eating" is based on the idea that you'll be eating pastrami and rye bread, or at least caramel corn. Clementines are very much easier on your teeth.

I had nightmarish problems with tooth sensitivity until one dentist told me that fluoride helped, and prescribed an expensive, foul-tasting, high-fluoride mouthwash. It doesn't help everyone, obviously, but my tooth sensitivity (especially cold sensitivity) gets significantly better when I use the fluoridated mouthwash designed for kids.

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