My teeth

When I was a kid, my left eye tooth came in at the wrong spot -- in front of my baby tooth instead of pushing it out. My dentist at the time said the baby tooth would eventually fall out because it didn't have much of a root. At some point between then and now I asked about having the adult tooth pulled instead of the baby tooth, but the dentist (whichever one that was) discouraged that for the same reason - baby tooth will fall out one day on its own.

I'm 28 years old. It never did fall out. I never worried about it too much -- I've had it for something like 15 years and I'm pretty used to it. This year, when my boyfriend proposed to me, all of a sudden it mattered. I want to have it look nice for my wedding photos! My current dentist had mentioned before that he thought it could be fixed with a retainer (which cost around $300) and I wouldn't need braces (which cost around $3,000) so the next time I was in for a checkup after I got engaged, I asked him about it.

He took an impression of my teeth, and told me it could, in fact, be done. I went back in to have another impression taken to have the retainer made from, and he pulled my baby tooth that day -- June 2, 2005.

Let me tell you, that tooth had plenty of root, thank you very much. Bleh. I never want to have a tooth pulled again -- and now he's talking about removing my wisdom teeth. I will be unconsious for that if I have anything to say about it.

Anyway, it has now been four months since the day I got my retainer, and my tooth is now in front of the gap left by the removal of the baby tooth -- phase one is nearly complete. The tooth just has to stabilize in this position (right now, if I take the retainer off for several hours, the tooth will slide back a couple of mm's) and then my retainer will be rewired to push it back into line with the others.

Here are some pictures of the progress.

June 2 - the day the baby tooth was pulled. I got the retainer two weeks later on June 15.

1 month

2 months

3 months

4 months

You can see that as of 3 months, the tooth beside it (the "lateral") started going crooked and is now overlapping my front tooth a little bit. That will be easy to fix in the next phase by kinking the wire across the front a little bit to my left. It's been kinked to the right to move my right lateral into place, and it was too tight and messed up the left one. Oops.

Front view - original.

Front view - 4 months.