Braces Horror Stories

There are braces horror stories from the movies, but there are real braces accounts of shock and torment as well. Here are some orthodontic nightmares for your viewing and reading pleasure.  

Keith traumatizing a child pic.twitter.com/HmNod514uh

— Good Fundies is short for Good Fundamentals (@goodfundies) July 20, 2017

Sports broadcaster Keith Hernandez shared a gruesome personal braces story of having a basketball slam into his braces-clad mouth, and having to go to the school nurse to get his lips painfully pulled from his braces.

After this incident, this writer took the opportunity to share her own braces horror story:

When I was 12 and a newly minted brace-face, I once found myself playing a stupid game with my younger sister that involved getting a running start to do somersaults off our parents’ bed. As I said, stupid! Especially so when I did some kind of flip that resulted in me careening off the bed at a decently high speed with my mouth open, which in turn resulted in me getting my braces embedded in the wall. I cannot tell you exactly how this happened; all I know is that one moment, I was flying through the air and the next, I was literally one with the wall of my parents’ bedroom. Imagine a kid who is stuck after licking a frozen pole, but stupider. That was me. 

You have very few options in such a situation!!! There is no school nurse to come save you, as there was in the case of Keith Hernandez. You are alone, just you and the wall you’re fast becoming intimately acquainted with. (And your 9-year-old sister, but like, who cares.) You can either send for your parents downstairs, or you can take care of it yourself. I chose the latter.  

That involved trying to yank my head away from the wall, begiinning to cry very hard, and then actually yanking my head away from the wall. Success! Except for chunks of plaster in my teeth, several broken brackets, blood on the carpet and a sizable dent left in the wall.

In the comments section, a poster shared their own experience:

If I may give this a shot - on the last day of soccer camp at a midwestern university, I collided with someone during a scrimmage and somehow landed on my face. I distinctly remember my head bouncing off the ground before the guy I collided with landed directly on my head, driving my face back into the dirt. My lips were firmly ground into my top and bottom braces, plus I broke something in my nose. When your lips get fucked up like that they get all puffy and bloody and stick out like you’re a hideous fish monster. The blood gushed out my nose and all around my mouth, and I kept swallowing so much blood that I had to vomit it up a few times. I think I also had a concussion so I was all whacked out. The camp didn’t want to call an ambulance for some reason and just told my mom to take me to the ER when she arrived to pick me up.

And another poster provided this account:

We had golf as an option for gym at my high school. We were waiting around for the teacher one day, and I took a huge divot with a practice swing. The divot arced through the air and landed squarely in a girls open mouth. The girl happened to have braces, and when most of the divot fell away, there were still clumps of grass sticking out of her braces. Not sure how long it took her to get rid of the taste.

And yet another braces trauma from another poster:

The braces-into-lips-during-basketball thing happened to me TWICE (one I recall was the day of Game 7 of the 97 Series and I watched the first few innings in the waiting area with my lip entwined in the metal). Unfortunately, there’s no delicate way to undo it other than the doc sticking two tongue depressors behind your lip, counting to 3, then RRRRRIP! 

Scary stuff! Anyone got any more gruesome orthodontic stories to share?