I am six weeks into my Invisalign treatment (read this if you need to understand why I do it) and despite the fact that the experience has been relatively drama-free so far, I realized this week that I’ve never felt such a lasting sensation of mild-to-moderate crossness in my entire life. It’s a very low-key, subtle kind of cross – an almost imperceptible level of irritation that most people wouldn’t even notice – but still. It is there and almost never leaves me.
Before we continue, however, it is important to note – especially for those who are considering Invisalign and may be put off – that I am not normal when it comes to dealing with minor annoyances in life. For some reason, I’ve always seemed to have a heightened sense of awareness when it comes to things in the world around me that are – or could potentially be – irritating. You could almost say I’m subconsciously trying to find things to cross paths with, I’m so good at tripping over them. Unless I’m at home, which is so quiet it’s like I’m in a sensory deprivation tank (never moving again, by the way), then you can pretty much guarantee I’ll find something to disturb me. Someone in the supermarket with very squeaky trainers, a man on the train who hasn’t turned off the keyboard clicking away on his iPhone, a gardener in a posh (supposedly relaxing) hotel who thinks it’s appropriate to use a leaf blower at 8am. .
Other people seem to be able to easily ignore these things and get on with their lives – they can brush off the fly that insists on slamming itself against the window frame when you open the window to escape, they can live with the door of garden hose that blows in the wind or the dishwasher that beeps every eight minutes to tell you it’s done. I, on the other hand, can’t. I have to correct these perceived attacks on my person immediately, or I can go from mild annoyance to total apoplectic meltdown in about four minutes. Obviously I’m British, so if the problematic incident involves another person, then I’d rather die than confront them directly about whatever they’re doing – I just hum and sigh loudly until they get the message – but in almost all other scenarios I’ll take swift action to neutralize the threat to my calm and peaceful existence.
God, if anyone was ever a good candidate for therapy.
So now that we’ve established how completely intolerant I am when it comes to external irritation, you can decide for yourself how seriously you’re going to take the complaints I’m about to make about my Invisalign aligners…
Things that bother me about Invisalign
1 – Pain.
You’ll be happy to know that I had no serious pain with my aligners. Maybe I’ve been blessed with a high pain threshold to make up for the fact that my irritation threshold is so comically low, or maybe my teeth just haven’t started to change significantly yet: who knows. But I’ve only had two occasions where I’ve had to take a couple of paracetamols and lie down for a ‘Mummy’s got a headache’ session. And to be quite honest, I love a “Mummy has a headache” session, especially if I don’t really have much of a headache. Illegal daytime adjournment? The kids that great uncle iPad took care of? come on
The underage part of the pain though? A bit annoying. It’s just this constant feeling of light pressure along the length of my upper jaw and up the sides of my face. It makes me feel quite tired, like I have the beginnings of PMT. Some days are worse than others, but they are almost always there. I’ve had worse pain though from various tongue sores and bitten lips and what have you, which has lessened a bit now that my mouth seems to know what it’s doing, but at first I had thick layers of Bonjela all over the inside of my mouth.
2 – Changes in speech.
The whole speech/speech change I was worried about? From an outsider’s perspective it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Not that noticeable, apparently, unless almost all of my family and friends are lying. Yes, an elderly aunt asked me on the phone if I was drunk and my hairdresser said “oh, I thought you just had a speech impediment”, but other than that…
From my point of view, however, I am still not convinced. It’s not so much that I’m embarrassed by the way I sound, which is relatively clear and only a little slurred on the repeated “s” sounds (don’t make me read that out loud), but I just find that talking to them is harder work. Wearing. I guess my mouth has to work harder to form the same sounds I’ve been making since childhood and then when I speak out of alignment it has to go back to the original way.
I could do a big, French shrug here and say tant pis Since it’s not a huge deal, none of these irritations are forever, but then again, I have a job that requires me to talk on camera for a good portion of my work day. So I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice it at all. It hurts my confidence a bit, which is shocking for someone who rarely hangs out and has no problem putting himself out there at every opportunity…
3 – Dry mouth.
I had never felt dry mouth before. Forty three – never a dry mouth! Even when Rich and I went to the Isle of Skye and did an impromptu 15 mile walk (this was before kids) and we only had two small cans of Strawberry Ribena with us and the sun came out and burned us and there was no civilization as we could to see and really thought we might die of thirst and exhaustion from the heat: even afterward my mouth wasn’t so dry. Not as dry as the arid, shriveled wasteland of a mouth wearing invisible grams. Dear God. I’m amazed that the inside of my cheeks don’t fuse with my gums and that they don’t fuse with my tongue and that my tongue doesn’t fuse with my lips!
Yes, I bought a special moisturizing mouth spray (it soothes it a bit and also smells nice and mouth-watering, which is refreshing between brushes) and yes, I’ve increased my water intake, but still. I have never known anything like it. Sometimes if I talk for more than twenty seconds at a time (especially outdoors) my lips curl up and stick to my gums. I have to unfold them manually. It must be quite disconcerting for the person I’m talking to.
By week six either I’ve gotten too used to this dry mouth or it’s settled down: I’m not sure which. Anyway, it wasn’t a debilitating side effect by any stretch of the imagination!
4 – The Eat-Brush-Stirve routine.
Okay, we’re getting to the big one here. it should probably be down A big nuisance and not of secondary importance, for this is the main cause of my constant low-key crossness, but there will always be someone ready to point out what is a “real” major annoyance. “Wait until you don’t even have teeth, that will give you something to complain about, mark my words!”
Thus, the Eat-Brush-Starve routine. You may or may not know this, depending on whether you’ve had these invisible braces on or not, but you can’t eat or drink (anything but water) with them. So you take them out to eat your meals, but then must brush your teeth well and then brush the aligners (not toothpaste) before putting them back in. does he want to brush more than that?
Not me.
Especially since the reason I have Invisalign in the first place is that I have alarmingly thin front teeth (like paper!) and they need to be corrected. Why would I want to spend a year eroding them with constant brushing? So I try to keep the extra brushing to just one hour: lunch. But this had a disastrous – devastating I tell you – effect on my usual free-for-all approach to food. I’m a shepherd, you see. I don’t really do a full size lunch, I eat half a lunch and then spread the rest throughout the day. Cheese and biscuits at 3.30 for example, maybe a cold sausage when the kids are having their tea to see me through to happy hour when us grown-ups sit in front of the telly at 8 with something monumentally delicious that I have lovingly cooked from scratch .
I also used to have a cup of herbal tea mid-morning, maybe a few squares of fancy chocolate or some cake or whatever morsels were around and an apple – oh, an apple! Always an apple, Pink Lady, crisp and slightly sour, I’d reach for it whenever I felt a lull and needed some sort of distraction from the kitchen.
All this is lost on me! Yes, I could add these pieces to lunch and just have it all at once, a normal sized lunch like a normal person, but you don’t want them all at once! I want to spread all this! I need food breaks, it gives me solid goals throughout the day to work towards and without them I’m lost at sea.
I don’t drink tea or coffee, but I can imagine that for tea and coffee drinkers the feeling is the same – you use these drinks to mark the day. It’s pretty much a small reward at the end of each activity module. Good. Imagine drinking these hot drinks only at mealtimes? No doubt you would rebel! (Actually, if you can’t live without tea and coffee, I’d go for fixed braces over Invisalign without a doubt. Clear aligners would make you miserable as sin and unbearable to be around.)
A side effect of not grazing is that I seem to shrink. It’s a bit Willy Wonka in that every time I take stock and catch my reflection in the full-length mirror, I’m a little smaller. I’ve started adding more chocolate at the ends of meals because that it’s obviously the most nutritious solution… ha!
So there you have it, my minor annoyances. Six weeks and twenty-six even this is only if they don’t lie to me about the duration of my treatment. I can imagine getting to the end of the allotted time and someone shaking their head at my mouth scans like a builder calculating the cost of a loft conversion and then suddenly it’s another twelve weeks…
I just need to finish before next Christmas. I’ve already done one zero by mouth (between meals) holiday season and I can’t say I’m crazy about doing another one. Not being able to eat a piece of cheese an hour, every hour for ten straight days seriously put a damper on my holiday style.
