I can luckily say that I am no longer experiencing the wonders and absolute pleasures of having to wear a plate anymore. It is a complete and utter death trap. A lisp-producing, liberal saliva-giving piece of orthodontic technology which I am absolutely glad is behind me.
I wore the removable maxillary arch expander plate 23/7 for 3 months since Tuesday, 5 October 2010—minus about an hour a day for eating. I used a winding prong weekly to tighten the plate by 45° in each of the three dimensions. It opened up my arch and gave me a little gap between my front teeth—months 2 and 3 are shown below—which was as expected.
It gets smelly, you can't completely close your teeth down together, and chewing gum—which I did para-religiously—is pretty hard to do. What can I say, it's great!
Maybe I'm most definitely overreacting here, and if you ever have to wear one of these, just think of how much it'll be worth it in the end, but this thing is horrible. The worst of it is the socially-debilitating lisp which is most likely the cause of the profuse amounts of saliva I had constantly pooling in my mouth. It was really hard for someone like me who never really does shut up.
It didn't hurt at all, which was a positive. It just felt like a firm pressure behind my teeth and upper roof of mouth. The only real good thing about it was that it wasn't very visible, but the clincher was that it was removable. If it wasn't, I'm not too sure how well I would have fared if it weren't.
Getting accustomed to the plate being in my mouth, and my speech around it, did get a little bit better after the first couple of weeks, but it wasn't anything to get really excited about. It didn't completely feel or sound normal, even after the first month and a half, but I did just get over it—aside from the speech which made me sound like, to be honest, I had a problem. I really wanted to be done with it, but not so much completely, because I wasn't looking forward to braces. Catch-22, really. What I can say was I was extremely happy when I got my blue, baby spacers put in today and only had to wear the plate for 16 hours a day until Friday, 28 January 2011, the date when I get my braces.
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