Mouthwear Stories: The Last Laugh

This story was retrieved from the old M's Mouthwear website from an internet archive. The Last Laugh

I was a Sophomore in College and and just gotten the fully banded braces off a few months before. While I was at school I was having a hard time wearing the retainers. The didn't seem to fit right and were causing me to gag a lot. I had to go home for a visit during thanksgiving break, and also had an ortho appointment. The appointment for for early in the morning around 8 a.m.. I figured that they were going to have to make new retainers so I intentionally left the old ones back at school so they would have to make ones that fitted and not just keep screwing with the old ones (I had them fixed several times where they would cut hunks of them out and send me home). Well, I got the the office and was waiting in the reception room. There was this 17 or 18 year old guy sitting there. He said his name was Chris. We got to talking and naturally the subject came around to what we were having done. I explained my retainer problem. He seemed quite interested and said that he was going to get some kind of permanent retainers and that he had never had braces before. Apparently his wisdom teeth did a number on his other teeth when they came in. He said that he was just going to get a couple small pieces of metal and a couple wires. A few minutes later they called us into the office. The arrangement looked like a General Motors Assembly Line with 8 chairs in a row. We were placed in chairs next to each other at the end of the line. The Ortho went to his chair first, looked into his mouth and called the assistant over. He instructed her to start banding his teeth and that they would be using a "full strap". They pulled one of the band carts over and the assistant began fitting his front top teeth with bands. Chris looked like he had been shot. He asked between bands what the Ortho was talking about. She stopped for a second and explained that he was getting bands and that full strap meant that all of his teeth would have bands on them. He wasn't happy, but I was laughing my butt off. They started by placing these thick separators they called dumbbells in-between his bottom teeth and back teeth. Then then started placing bands where I guess they had enough room. The look on his face as all that shiny metal went in was something to see, and I was enjoying every minute of it. A few minutes later the Ortho came back in and asked where my retainers were. I said that I had accidentally left them at school. He acted kind of pissed off. He went to the desk and brought back my chart. In red magic marker he wrote RELAPSE all over it. He then called another assistant over and told her to start banding my teeth and that it also would be "full strap". They started placing those rubber dumbbells between my bottom and back teeth and started banding my top front teeth. The bands didn't hurt, but those separators really put on the pressure. I looked over at Chris and he was laughing his head off. In fact he was laughing so hard that the bands that were already fitted were falling out. After about 45 minutes they had most of our top bands and in my case a couple of the bottom ones cemented in, scrapped clean. They then told us to go makes ourselves comfortable in the waiting room to give the dumbbells a chance to separate the rest of our teeth. We crawled out of the chairs and went to the waiting room. I don't know about Chris, but my teeth that had the dumbbells between them were hurting. By this time neither one of us was laughing. What Chris didn't knew, and that I as a veteran knew was that the ortho had three band wagons. Two of them had wide bands in them with large brackets, and the other one had narrow bands with smaller brackets that looked like little boxes. If they had used the narrow bands on me, I figured it probably wouldn't be too bad in that they wouldn't show too much. There were no mirrors in the waiting room and the bathroom was way down the hall (and they told us not to leave the waiting room). I was pretty curious as to what size bands I got, and couldn't tell by feeling them. I knew Chris and gotten the wide bands because it was pretty obvious. His were huge with big brackets. That left 2 other band carts so I figured I had a 50-50 chance of having the narrow bands. I had to find out and that meant explaining the band situation to Chris. He took a long look at my new metal and said that he didn't know what was big or small, but mine looked pretty big to him. I asked him if the bracket looked like a box. He said it looked like two vertical rectangles with a space between them. He wanted to know if he got the narrow bands. He wasn't pleased to hear that he didn't. After about an hour, we were called back in and seated in our original chairs. The assistants pulled out the dumbbells and started banding the remainder of our teeth. This took about another hour and the office was quickly filling up. The ortho came in at one point and started griping about the unplanned chair time I was taking up. After the bands were placed and cleaned, we were each handed a toothbrush and told to go to the sink and give our braces a good brushing to get off any remaining cement around the brackets. This was the first look we had at the braces that would remain for the next couple years. That first look really blows your mind. My bands were indeed the same kind Chris got....wide! I remember that they were so shiny that the bracket kind of blended in with the band and just looked like one shiny hunk of metal. Both of us had all of our teeth banded. Chris looked like he was going to be sick. We were then placed back in our chairs for the archwires. The ortho came up to Chris and told his assistant to use a flex wire so he wouldn't be in much pain. He then came over to me and looked in my mouth. He said that I should thank the assistant for doing such a great job banding me. He then told the assistant to start with a 016 wire. She asked if that wasn't a little large for a starting wire. He got kind of pissed off again and told here to do what she was told. He also told her to place some archwire hooks and 1/4 inch heavy elastics. The arch wires went in and ligature wires were used to tie in each bracket. They didn't bother to cut each wire, but left them all hanging until all brackets were wired in. I felt like I had a mouth full of wire spaghetti. Chris was getting pretty much the same treatment. We were soon done and left the office together. As we were walking out onto the street, Chris looked over and smiled real big and asked how funny I thought him getting braces was now. I had to laugh. I guess Chris had the last laugh.