Hello everyone and welcome to my blog where I will be talking about my orthodontic journey.
First of all, I’m going to give you guys a little bit of background. My orthodontic “awareness” started when I was about 28 years old (so back in 2017, I am now about to turn 33 yo), I had never really paid attention to all these little details before but symptoms getting worse and worse I started noticing them.
Basically, here are the symptoms that I’ve suffered:
- incompetent lip (my lips cannot touch and display about 1 cm of teeth at rest, forcing on chin muscle to be able to close my mouth)
- gummy smile
- teeth crowding in the lower arch
- white stains and pain in the morning on the upper front incisors
- drooling while sleeping
- constant runny nose every single day
- recessed chin
- dry mouth in the mornings
- difficulties swallowing
- bad posture
- TMJ cacking (right side, occasionally)
You can see with the pictures below some of the symptoms I’ve mentionned above. These were taken a few weeks after my first ortho treatment which involved brackets on the lower 8 teeth only.
Jaw is firmly closed but lips can’t touch at all! It’s called “incompetent lips”
Forcing on the chin (mentalis) muscle to be able to close my lips, but as soon as lose focus, my lips open again. I have to make a constant effort throughout the day to keep my lips closed.
Here’s a little bit more info on my teeth related background:
- No breastfeed as a child
- Never wore braces as a child
- 1 root canaled tooth (2nd premolar) in 2009
- All 4 wisdom teeth extracted in 2010
- First failed ortho treatment in 2017
- Start of Oromyofunctionnal therapy in 2017
- Start of Buteyko therapy in 2017
- Tongue tie release in 2018
- Start of AGGA treatment in May 2019
- AGGA removal in June 2021
As of today, nothing a few symptoms have been taken care of:
- The constant runny nose was fixed by changing my breathing patterns. Thanks to the buteyko therapy, I have trained to breathe through my nose and barely have a runny nose anymore! I also feel way more energetic when I wake up in the morning.
- The drooling while sleeping as well as the white stains and pain from dryness on the upper front teeth in the morning have been fixed thanks to mouth taping! I have discovered that the fact that I was mouth breathing at night was preventing my saliva to mineralize my teeth and that was the reason why I had white stains and pain on those teeth. As you know, I cannot close my mouth without forcing on my chin muscle, so it is impossible for me to close my mouth at night. So I temporarily fixed all this by putting some surgical tape on my mouth, every single night since 2017 in order to keep my mouth closed at night and protect my teeth! It’s been working wonders, the stains have almost disappeared, unless i fall asleep without the tape, they reappear in the morning 😦 the tape also helps with the drooling if the tape seals the lips correctly, but it’s really difficult since the space is over 1cm.
- There was another pain on upper front teeth that remained, it was mostly due to the fact that I was pushing on the upper front teeth with my lower front teeth, I grinded my teeth when I was younger, and I think i might still be doing it to try to breathe better during the night as I discovered that I have mild sleep apnea.
- The difficulties swallowing are almost corrected with the tongue tie release and oromyofunctionnal therapies I’ve undergone! I have to admit that I still find myself swallowing improperly (I swallow air sometimes) so I should maybe do tongue exercices now and then to keep reminding my body how to properly swallow.
Some things are even worse, as I will explain in a next blog post about my AGGA treatment, and new found conditions that I had but just discovered them. So these are added problems:
- Bite is completely off
- Spaces between a lot of my teeth
- mild sleep apnea
- SRA (short root anomaly)
I am now looking for ways to pursue treatment and hopefully fix everything without going through surgery if possible. In the next few blog posts, I will update you on all the treatments and therapies I have done ever since 2017 before we can catch up to my current situation and worries which involves a possible orthodontic treatment with TADs.
Thank you for reading up to this point and do not hesitate to comment! Are you on a similar journey? I will be more than happy to chat with you in the comments!
Teeth Advmentures 