I have been reading other peoples blogs like crazy! Trying to be as informed and ready as possible, although i dont know if i will get there. But anyway heaps of others people have helped me to get half-way there and i figured why not give it a go, so here it goes.
I have started this blog for myself so that and I remember everything, to be proud of everything that i have done, and also so that i NEVER forget to take care of my teeth, I am not going through all of this to ruin it all doing something stupid. i am also doing this so that i might help someone else the same way that i was helped with other peoples blogs. :) I've been reading more blogs and many just dont seem to have enough detail in some area's so i have decided to pretty much update on everything surgery related, so sorry if some things seem very pointless, i just figured that this is what I would want.
I will try and answer any the questions, and please ASK if you have any questions, i would be more than happy to answer.
This post is basically my journey up to my decision to have Jaw surgery, I need Lower Jaw
surgery to move my jaw forward about 9mm(approximately), if you want to know more detail Read on. :)
So, i thought i would start at the begining:
I started my whole braces journey at the age of 13, in 2007, January 25th 2007 to be exact. Thinking that i would have braces of for the ussual 18 months.
But then i found out i had an impacted canine tooth, meaning that rather then growing downward, as teeth normally would, it grew across the palate having the possibility of knocking out my front teeth. extending my whole process to three years!! although it has now been almost four years and the end doesnt seem any closer.
Because of this whole 'eye' tooth situation I had to have a small proceedure where they cut my gum open to expose the tooth, which was dragged down and with months of elastics, although with this whole proceedure with my first ortho more problems were made. Because i had the elastics i needed to have a special plate type appliance on my bottom teeth, although i could not remove it, and due to the timing of the plate and my age the plate affected the growth of my lower Jaw, causing the jaw to be MUCH smaller than my upper jaw.
I got to two and a half years of this journey and not much had been done, i was nowhere near getting the braces off by the three year goal. So we (me and my mum) went searching for a new orthodontist, and we found one and he has been fantastic.
I had to get a new set of braces on and i finally got rid of the horrible plate and got full braces which was lovely :). My othodontist then suggested that i may need jaw surgery to fix my problemed or 'deformed' jaw. Both me and my mum really didnt agree and thought that there must have been a better option, so the ortho gave me the option of getting two teeth romoved from my upper jaw and just closing the gap OR the surgery, but he kept pushing and trying to persuade us to take the surgery option as he felt that this was best option for fixing my problem. So it was option one: get two teeth removed, or option two: get surgery; and you can probably guess which option i was leaning toward, thats right option one.
But we decided that rather than making a decision we would look at both options, especially considering my orthodontist's persistence on the surgery; although as far as i was concerned i was not getting surgery, we went to a consultation with the Oral surgeon (OS) and he told me that without the surgery my bite would never be completely fixed, causing problems like headaches, jaw pain and the wearing down of teeth which i had already been experiencing and caused a few nights of limited sleep.
So from this I decided that going through a few weeks of discomfort better then a lifetime of pain, and the oral surgeon said that my wisdom teeth will be removed during the surgery, 'killing two birds with one stone.' In fact one of his least compelling arguments being that i would have to go under general anesthetic for wisdom surgery anyway so 'i might as well just do it as well.' I was not so convinced form this, but in other ways he made me feel really comfortable with the decision and at ease with the whole idea of surgery, and the recovery, assuring me that there would be very little pain.
So i am almost into my forth year of my journey and i am expecting to my surgery sometime in either june/july or december next year.
I'm hoping for the best and will update whenever something new happens.
And sorry for my Loongg and somewhat boring post, but i figured that i'd give you all the facts to begin with. thanks for reading :):)
