(BIG sigh of relief................)
As with my 11th trays, I can feel my crossbite tooth moving the slightest bit more in front of the lower tooth. Again, if I move my lower jaw back in an extreme way, I can have the sensation of what that one tooth would feel like if it were in front of the tooth beneath it. I know it may sound really stupid to get so excited about how your teeth would feel in a certain position, but for someone who's pretty much always had crooked teeth, the sensation is really exhilirating! I really can't wait for the next set of trays, where I'll REALLY be able to feel my crossbite tooth set firmly in front of the tooth beneath it.
Fortunately, I have yet to experience my crossbite tooth and the one below it hitting each other accidentally while eating. I had been forewarned about this from both the ortho and one of his assistants, Trish, who did Invisalign for the same problem. Luckily, I'll keep my fingers crossed (but NOT my teeth! sorry -- corny dental humor had to rear its ugly head at some point in this blog of mine) that this doesn't really happen to me.
I encountered the slightest bleeding towards the end of these trays. Once, Hubby and I were at a pizza parlor, waiting for our order to be ready, and he notioned that my teeth were slightly pink. Since he knows about all my bloody gums with the previous trays, he knew I must have bled the tiniest bit, but that the blood had gotten really diluted within the trays. I sucked on them, like I was trying to get the excess spit out, and it was gone.
However, once I got home that night, they started bleeding a bit more. They stopped again after about a 1/2 hour or so. Weird, I know. It's just such a little amount, though, and happens only along my gumline where it's lower from the crossbite tooth, that it doesn't concern me in any way. My teeth aren't loose in any way, so all the more reason for me not to get too worried about it.
What's kind of weird is that, although I hardly felt any pressure or movement with this set of trays, something about the movement that was made really makes the changes in my teeth more obvious than I had originally thought. It wasn't until I actually posted all these pictures that I noticed the major differences in them. This prompted me to edit my posting, and to add some comparison pictures between post-Tray 12 and post-Tray 1. The pictures below will have Tray 12 on the top, and Tray 1 pictures on the bottom.
Center smile. You'll notice an indentation on my gums right in between my 2 upper front teeth - this is because I had just removed the trays from my teeth. Do you also notice that, even in this picture, my crossbite tooth is right on the cusp of jumping over to the front side? In general, it's just more visible, so my smile is more symmetrical:
Center, mouth agape. Even in this picture you can see that my bottom teeth are lining up nicely:
Lower. Getting closer to that perfect "U" shape, and away from the "W" shape they were starting to get into:
Upper. Do you see how my crossbite tooth has been inching forward to meet up with the rest of the front teeth?
Crossbite side. Again, my gums are a little puffy because I had just taken out the trays. You have to realize that the top of the trays are right above my gum line where my crossbite is, so it's going to swell right around there the tiniest bit:
Closeup of the crossbite. You can really see here how the bottom of that tooth is just about to officially jump over to the front side in this picture. You might also notice that my molars aren't really meshing well on this side. I'm thinking that this might have something to do with that crossbite tooth temporarily interfering.
Either way, I'll bring it to my ortho's attention when I go back to see him in 8 weeks. I'll be finished with my trays, but he just told me tonight that he'll be taking new molds for a "refinement" process, which I'm delighted about. I had been told he was a perfectionist, as am I, so I wouldn't want anything less than absolutely perfect teeth at the end. My basic movies didn't make me 100% happy, since, as I've mentioned in previous posts, my gumline didn't show recession above the crossbite tooth to match the corresponding tooth on the other side. I know the movies are meant to show tooth movement and not fleshy tissue movement, but I'm just glad to hear that any slight tweaks in getting my teeth totally straight are going to be done.
Speaking of done, can you believe I'm 75% done now?????
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