methylethyl

I cut the wire on my child's braces. I did it in a Walgreen's parking lot, on a Saturday evening, with a pair of heavy-duty toenail clippers I'd just purchased inside.*

Once the pressure was off, we continued to the Walmart (further away), got a proper wire cutter tool, and pulled the whole wire out, in three or four sections.

I'm still not sure what went wrong with it, that day. In the morning, he handed me a bracket that had popped off, from the next-to-last molar. It left a wire-end unmoored. It wasn't poking anything, so we figured we'd call the office Monday and ask about it. Later in the day, though, it was hurting his front teeth, and something was not looking right with the spring crossing the front. It kept popping out the front in a big arch, and he'd push it back in. But it got more and more painful, and... was that tooth really at that funny angle before?

OK, now we're calling the emergency number on the ortho's website, and... we left a message on the voicemail. And texted them. With pictures. Please help, we don't know what to do. It's trying to push his tooth out. No response.

We called every ortho in the county with an emergency contact number, plus the emergency dental place. Finally got someone to answer, and told us it was OK to cut the wire and take it out. We were already on our way to the Walmart to get wire cutters, when that reply came through. Nice to have reassurance for the thing we were going to do anyway.

Removing the wire took the pressure off the tooth, but... it was scary loose.

I'm writing this at +4 days out, and it's firmed up since. So relieved. At least about the tooth. About the orthodontics: I've been lying awake for hours ruminating about it, every night.

How the (expletive deleted) did we get here?

I don't like orthodontics. I don't think it's healthy, and I'm not into cosmetic procedures. I don't want or need my kids to have perfect straight middle-class teeth. But they do have some bite issues (in addition to crowded front teeth), and there is some health argument for correcting that. Unfortunately for this purpose, we live in the US, and not in a big city, so it's nigh impossible to find a practitioner willing to just do bite correction, and not bother with all the (expletive) braces and expanders and stuff, to the tune of like $6k per kid.

We couldn't afford that, so we weren't going to do it. I thought. But then my MIL got in on it, pressured my husband, offered to pay, and... yeah, I caved. Against instinct. Against everything I had read on the subject. I was afraid of being the Bad Mommy who doesn't take her kid to the doctor when he needs medical attention. Because she Read Stuff on the Internet. Plus, my grandparents paid for my sibling's braces. That's normal, right?

(expletive deleted)

I interviewed a bunch of orthos, picked the least scary one, the only one who had anything whatever to say about bite correction (and it was little enough) that wasn't completely infantile, like... Well, how is that going to help his bite? You see, we're going to grow his jaw forward... grow. his jaw. forward. No really please explain the mechanics of this. Oh, don't worry your pretty head about it little lady: we're the experts. So it's what? Magic? (no we didn't go to that one). Then there was the one where we never saw an actual orthodontist: we only talked to the sales lady with the fake eyelashes, and when she showed us the x-rays, my child's whole neck was in the picture. You're supposed to use a lead vest and try to avoid the thyroid when you do that, aren't you? Did I hallucinate that? Do x-rays not use radiation anymore? I've read a bunch of papers on stuff available in... other countries mostly. And the occasional US urb big enough to support alternative practitioners. I asked about bite blocks, bite turbos, myobrace-style mouthpieces, Planas direct tracks... everything I'd found that directly addressed bite correction. It was like I'd started speaking Swahili in the sales office.

All of them want to move all my kids' teeth around for two straight years and crank their skulls open with metal appliances, to the tune of $11-12k, with bite correction being some kind of distant third-order side-effect, if we're lucky. I felt sick when I finally chose one, and put the thousand dollars down and scheduled the execu-- er, the installation. I felt more sick when my MIL visited a couple weeks later and had:

1) Taken a wonderful trip to Europe that she couldn't stop talking about.
2) Completely forgotten that she offered to subsidize the ortho work.

We listened to all this. Swallowed hard over a cold wave of panic. Travel is wonderful, you see. We do not disagree: we did some of that in our youth. We are not entitled to anybody else's money. We will reassess our finances and try to find a way through.

We got the braces installed.

The same evening, a bracket popped off older kid, and he was in a lot of pain. We called the next morning and they said, come right in, we'll fix it. So we did. At that appointment, 24 hours after the install, the tech looked at my child's teeth and said, chirpily, "Wow! I can't believe how much progress that's made in just one day!" and then went and got the doc to come look. He said much the same thing. The tech did something to the spring that was pushing on the tooth in question-- the one that had visibly moved overnight. Even I could see it. Kid said it hurt a lot less after that. They did not explain what happened there, or what they did. At all. It had nothing to do with the bracket, which they left off, because it hadn't been attached to the wire yet anyway.

I'm not an idiot. Teeth aren't supposed to be moved around that quickly. It can damage the roots, and cause them to die and fall out. I should have said something then, but... I process slowly, and I'm extremely averse to confrontation. I needed to think about it, be careful, and try not make snap emotional decisions. I knew I had been lied to, about something that concerned my child's health and a catastrophic financial commitment for our family, that I already felt awful about being pressured into, and I had violence in my heart. If I had opened my mouth... 50/50 odds my husband would have had to come sign me out of psychiatric lockup.

I was still mulling it over when younger kid had the palate expander installed. We knew that evening, that this was a terrible mistake. He ate chicken gumbo, and some orange slices (both legal, according to the chart), and everything in his mouth was festooned with shrouds of chicken string and orange guts. That was after he'd brushed and used the water pick. We spent half an hour helping him de-gunk. And we understood, irrevocably, that he was not ready for any of this, and that we would not be spending the next two years cleaning his teeth for him. We agreed to think about it a few days and ask around for advice first, but... we had to get all that junk out of his mouth before the trapped food rotted his teeth out. We never used the tool to crank it open. It was a lost cause.

The weekend emergency happened while we were still contemplating what to do about all that. It happened on the feast day of his patron saint. Maybe it was a sign.

And now, we are done.

The office called us Monday morning: we got your message! When would you like to come in? No worries, we already cut the wire and took it out, so it's not urgent anymore. OK, well, we can see him today and put a new one in. No thank you. I think we're done with this whole project, and we don't have any use for an ortho we can't contact in an emergency. We'll let you know where to have the records transferred when we've lined up somebody to fix it.

An hour or so later, the ortho himself called. I didn't want to talk to him, but tried to be polite anyway. No, we don't want to have anything further to do with your office.

Why is this like breaking up with a clingy boyfriend, more than a business transaction with a medical office?

I called around to most of the local orthos, asking about braces removal. Here's a new wrinkle! Most of them have some sort of gentlemen's agreement with each other, that they don't touch other orthodontists' work. They won't remove braces installed by someone else, and they won't see my kids. Not all, though. Two of them gave me a price for removal and said they'd do it. I mentioned this later, to my mom, and she said: Oh, yeah, that happened to us when your sister's ortho killed himself. I couldn't find anybody to take her braces off. So I guess that's been going on a long time, but... is it really a gentlemen's agreement, or is it just that removals don't pay enough moolah to be worth messing with?

Anyway, we've since made appointments for a month out (nothing sooner), with another ortho, to remove all the glued-on junk from their mouths.

I wish that was the end of the story. Younger kid was complaining about discomfort the last couple days, so we decided to remove those wires as well. Getting in there and actually looking at the situation... I am sick to my stomach. They weren't full wires yet. Just the fronts. And now all his front teeth are basically in a straight line, it looks super weird, and all his canine teeth are, like brother's problem tooth, scary loose now. How did I let someone do this to my kid? Why did I let myself be pressured into this? Gonna be up till midnight, again, waiting for the adrenaline to wear off.

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*Not recommended. The metal's cheap and gets divots in it quickly. Wire cutters are better, and if it's not a right-now emergency, we have verified that doing the tedious thing where we clipped each of the little colored plastic doohickeys on the brackets will let the wire lift gently out of the brackets in one piece, so we don't have to worry about any stray bits of wire. That was the really anxiety-inducing part: making sure we had ALL the wire, and not leaving some stub somewhere to work its way out and be swallowed in the night. That's nightmare fuel.