Chewy

So, soon after I posted the previous blog entry, I walked to the Downtown area of Huntington Beach to go catch the route 1. While on board, I resumed playing Sudoku on my nook.

This was not a good idea, because I ended up missing my stop and had to walk back to the previous stop, about a good mile away. I called up OCTA to find out when the next route 35 was leaving so I could get to Dr. Graham's office and found that it was leaving the next minute. "Run, Forrest! Run!"

So, I ran and got to the bus about a minute after it was supposed to leave, but the driver saw me running and waited. I hopped on board and grabbed a seat in the back and the driver doesn't have the air conditioning running. When I got to my stop, I had to yell at him to stop or else he would have driven right past it.

Now, irritated, I walk into Dr. Graham's office. Soon, the waiting room is full of patients for their 10:30 appointments. We all got herded into a 2nd waiting area, then get called in and assigned different seats.

Soon, one of the dental assistants joined me and asked if I was getting all my spacers put in. I didn't think about this at first and said "Yes" before I remembered that Dr. Graham was going to brace me on the bottom first to make room for the upper brackets. The assistant came back with the spacers and I told her what was going on. She inspected my bite, then went and got my chart. She then made a quick consultation with Dr. Graham and started placing the spacers between my molars and 2nd bicuspids.

I think the spacers are blue elastic bands that they use for braces. When they place them in, they stretch them out so that they're like a slightly thicker piece of dental floss. They then spring into their normal shape and move the teeth apart form each other so there is space to place the metal bands.

When the assistant was finished, she told me that she's looking forward to the finished results of my surgery. She related the story of her ex-husband and told me that his underbite was even more severe than my own. The results were, in her words, fantastic. Of course, dopey me, I forgot to ask her name or look at her nametag. Oh well, I'll be in next week.

Next week, I go in for braces and the whole thing really begins in earnest. Forward, ever forward. Check back here next week.