Like a lot of kids, I wore braces in middle school. My mom did too; it was her idea to get me to do it in middle school so I’d have a chance of being more popular in high school. Like a lot of kids, I wasn’t very good at wearing my post-braces retainer. Turns out when you’re not the one shelling out $6000 for the hardware and procedure, you don’t care very much! I had a so-called permanent retainer put on my lower front teeth a few years later, probably in 2002 or so, to keep them and only them straight, and then promptly ignored my top and bottom retainers for the next several decades. I found the things mouldering away in their little blue box sometime during my years at Marston Ave, was horrified by how groddy they looked, and threw them away.

Sometime in 2013 or 2014 or so, I ate a piece of sticky candy from the middle east given to me by a friend, it was crunchy and covered in nuts. It pulled the permanent retainer right off my teeth and I swallowed it. I didn’t notice it until brushing my teeth around 1am or so before bed. Hello, hospital please? Yes, can I get an x-ray of my esophagus to make sure a metal wire isn’t lodged halfway down? Alright, all good. Do I want another permanent retainer put on, the dentist asked at my next appointment. No, why would I? I’m a big boy man now, my teeth won’t move anymore.

somewhere an orthodontist laughs softly in the darkness

Fast-forwarding to 2022 or so – Christine and I had just gotten married the previous year. Now that she knew she had her beautiful hooks into me for real, she occasionally remarked that hmm, my lower teeth were looking a bit… jutting. In the past decade or so, one of my front upper teeth had decided it was going to cross in front of the other front tooth, probably to escape from the jagged snaggles of the lower front teeth. I didn’t want to admit it, but that fateful 2014 decision to not get another permanent retainer may have not been the right one.

Armed with a recent raise and the power of the Delta Dental PPO Plus Premier – Select Plus (so good they put plus in the name twice) insurance which would cover, oh, $2000 or so of the approximately $6000 cost – I decided to go down the rabbit hole again in May 2023. Dental Health Associates (DHA), a well-known company in Madison that bought my previous dentist Kathleen Kelly’s private practice on the capitol square about a decade ago and did pretty well with it as their new ‘downtown branch’ had an orthodontia service as well, one Dr. Shasker over on the east side, only a 5 minute drive from where I live. I got to like Dr Shasker and his team of technicians over the past 2.5 years – they loved to banter with each other, crack jokes, and listen to good music (to my millennial standards at least) off an old record player next to the dental chairs. I like to think I was a model patient – always wore my rubber bands to re-align my jaw, and flossed well… if not every day, at least every other day. I wasn’t going to screw this up.

But on Sept 3, the “fun times” (okay that might be stretching it; eating rice and anything with gluten in it has been a nightmare since getting these on due to the after-cleanup) had to come to an end. When they told me two weeks earlier that the time had come and that I’d need to sign a waiver stating that I was content and happy with the results of my treatment, I started peering at my mouth in the mirror closely. I noticed a tiny jut on one of the lower front teeth above the other one, no more than a half millimeter or so, which Dr S obligingly sanded right off with his power tools. I signed the waiver.

The braces themselves pop right off in seconds with a little pry tool – a mini crowbar? Bracebar? My whole mouth took about 4 minutes to completely de-brace. However the hardest part was the sanding off the ‘cement’ that had held each brace onto my teeth. The sound of that grinder, and the smell of the powdered cement floating out of my mouth and into my nostrils was exhausting and disgusting. The high pitched frequency of it right against my teeth, i.e. my head itself and vibrating into my eardrums, almost had me in tears of agony. I probably left finger dents in the armrests of the chair. But finally, it was over. Or at least over enough that my favorite technician, Alicia, took pity on me and released me. I guess if a dentist notices some last bits of cement on my teeth in a future check-up of any mouth-related variety, they can always quick sand it off then. I can probably handle 5 minutes more of it, it was just hard doing a half hour of it.

A last fun gift they left me with was the ‘forbidden treats trove’ – a coffee thermos with some bags of microwave popcorn and the thermos was packed with all sorts of sticky, crunchy candy. That was a nice touch.

One final word of awesomeness about Dr Shasker – way back in May 2023, when he and I first did a consult together about how my mouth might be corrected with braces, he had done a full model of my mouth in clay. That’s what he held up in the consult, gesturing to this area of overbite or that area of jut, to say what his plan was. I told him I’d love to have that model after the treatment was over, and he chuckled and said we’d talk later. I never did forget about the model though, and brought it up at the removal. Alicia told me later though, that the DHA legal team wanted the orthodontists to hold onto each model for a full ten years after treatment, just in case a patient tried to sue them for not properly fixing their teeth (they also took an “after” model too which was similarly held on to) – I guess in court that way the DHA lawyers could hold up the before model, the after model, and the signed waiver, and probably get things thrown out of court pretty fast.

So when I came the week after my braces were removed to receive my new retainers, Dr Shasker had a surprise for me. According to Alicia, he had stayed after work for an hour the previous night with the original cast molds from 2023 and made an entire second model of my original pre-braces mouth, as well as an extra one of my post-braces mouth too. “You owe him a bottle of whiskey!” she told me with a laugh. When Dr Shasker presented me with the models, and the mold too (“they’re yours now, if you lose that model you can always make another one with some molding powder and water!”) I offered to get him a bottle of Macallan scotch and he’s like oh don’t listen to Alicia, I don’t need anything from you – I’m the same as you Zach, I like these little memories and trinkets, although my wife hates I have shoeboxes filled with crap hiding in closets all over the house.

Before and after shots! The blue color on the “after” model (separate of the chipping, which just happened when it came out of the mold) is some sort of dye they use for their ‘after’ model showing where they used the most tension on the wires, apparently, in the treatment plan? I might have that goofed up.

And hey, this might be a fun project for Luke when he’s older. “Want to make a cast of daddy’s teeth? Let’s go buy some modeling powder, what fun!”

Next up – getting an implant and crown for the section of my mouth that is missing a tooth – that’s next month. I was born without an adult tooth under the baby tooth in that spot, so I had the decrepit, falling-apart baby tooth pulled right before I had the braces put in. First and only time the bill for a periodontal visit was $15 total! I can’t wait to have a “complete” mouth for the first time in my life…