Put 2 and 2 together...

Something for you wannabe Sherlock Holmes out there -

Last night, gorged myself thoroughly at a potluck dinner. Ate and ate until I started having trouble breathing. While burning off 3 calories/hour during a round of taboo, I started getting those quiet rumblings in the stomach. The ones that make you nervous when you're in a group setting...when I got home it was like 2 gnomes having a boxing match in my stomach. BAD. I think my forehead had beads of sweat while I was going up the stairs to my apartment. Anyways, I'll leave the rest of the story up to your imaginations. No need to go into any details.

Later that night, I'm flossing. Flossing has become a tedious nightmare since getting these braces. I need to loop the floss through each bracket and then remove and loop again. It's just plain annoying. I almost want to skip the flossing altogether but then I floss some food out from between my teeth the refreshing feeling that its out is just hard to beat. :) I'm flossing, flossing, flossing...get to the back of my left side when I notice - the last bracket is missing and the wire is just sitting out out loose, nothing holding it down. What the. I lost a bracket and didn't even notice?!

Have you guys put the 2 stories together? I can't think of any other conclusion cept that I must have swallowed that metal bracket during dinner --> stomach pains.

Has to be! No one else got sick from dinner (or did they? speak up please).

Dude. How embarrassing. I have to call my orthodontist now for an emergency replacement. Which means an afternoon sitting amongst the pre-teen kiddies watching the Scooby Doo movie because my 3x year old self ate a stupid brace. I mean seriously, who does that?!

Metal Mouth

I'm 4 days into my braces. And man, I must have completely forgotton how painful they are. Forget the soreness, that I can deal with. (with the help of 2 advil thank you). The insides of my cheeks are cut up. The tip of my tongue is slashed and sensitive and the upper corners of my inside lip are bruised to no tomorrow. It hurts just to sit quietly with my mouth closed. It actually feels better when I smile or just sit with my mouth open like a deranged person with facial twitches. Oddly, I can't leave the pain alone. Every few minutes I'm doing something that makes me shed a single tear in pain. Why??? It's like when your fingers smell and you have to keep smelling them even though its rancid. I suppose I'm a glutton for pain.

This sucks.

But I already noticed that my teeth have shifted - the gap between my 2 front teeth has already become so much smaller that its hard to floss. I coulda flossed with a post-it last week, that's how big the gap was. But my canines have also shifted - into a position that when I bite down, I can't get my molars to make direct contact to basically I can't chew. Which resulted in a very painful dinner trying to eat my steak and pasta. I ended up just whole swallowing chunks of meat. (Very distressing news to my colonics technician haha)

Ideally I'd like to post some pictures to show the progress...but I'm still holding onto what pride I have left. I didn't realize how goonie I'd feel talking to coworkers/starbucks barista/halal street vendor with a mouth full of metal. I've developed this new habit of trying to cover it up with my upper lip when I talk but when I tested it out in front of the mirror last night I realized I've been looking quite stupid and failing miserably in my attempts.

This sucks.