Yuckmouth

My teeth were a pediatric dentist's nightmare. My bottom jaw was too narrow to accomodate them all, so one of my bottom teeth had no room and was growing directly behind the others, and they were a crooked mess. Up top, I had an extra set of vampire incisors and a huge gap between the front two. So before I got my braces when I was 11, I had three extractions.

I will never forget getting those braces put in. My braces were all metal, all wraparound and were applied to my teeth with a barely neolithic instrument that worked with a trigger-like thing on the side that the technician would pull back and release, causing a metal drill to deploy force down. The technician's hand slipped once, slicing a two-inch gash into my upper gums. Blood gushed, and she and I both started crying. I was sent home to heal for a week before the rest of the braces could be applied.

So I really was a metal mouth for three and a half years during the most awkward period of any girl's life. It was so embarrassing, especially my freshman year in high school, when everything is already embarrassing. I did my best to speak with my lips as close together as possible to hide the nearly always-filled-with food unironic grille I was sporting.

Those trips to the orthodontist to have them tightened are probably the worst memories of my childhood. I knew going in each time that I would be miserable and hungry for three days after. And no matter how much I complained about the wires digging into the insides of my upper cheeks, they’d always tell me to use wax and rinse with saltwater. I have deep scars to this day from the ulcers those wires caused.

I got the braces off before my sophomore year. My teeth were straight, but I still had a horrible overbite -- if I bit down on my back teeth, I could touch the roof of my mouth with my finger -- but my orthodontist had taught me to just hold it forward so that my front teeth met.

As a result, I developed chronic TMJ. My jaw popped and locked up constantly. I had a headache and sore neck for the next five years, until my mom made me an appointment with a plastic surgeon to assess my weak chin. He told us to make an appointment with an oral surgeon as soon as possible.

We made the appointment, and the surgeon recommended TMJ surgery. Unfortunately, before he could do anything, my upper palate would have to be stretched and my teeth realigned. Orthodontically.

So the summer before my senior year in college, I got my second set of braces (from a new orthodontist). At least this time, they were the stick-on kind, clear on the top and metal on the bottom. As a bonus, I was equipped with a palatal separator: a big hunk of metal that attached to my back top molars and sat a few millimeters from the roof of my mouth. In the middle was a rectangular, expandable bar that I turned with a key each night. Each turn of that key forced my palate to expand, and each turn produced a shot of pain that I could hear and feel through the roof of my mouth and into my sinuses.

The pain I could deal with. The speech impediment I could not. Try spreading your fingers across the distance of your back molars without touching the roof of your mouth and saying, “The inquisitive queen, in search of a clue, was quite curious as a calico cat.” All my hard c and q words were impossible to pronounce.

The worst thing I experienced as a result of my tongue not being able to touch the roof of my mouth and function properly came when I went to buy tickets to see my favorite band in the world for the very first time. It was the days before Ticketmaster got us all over the barrel and we could buy concert tickets from multiple vendors without a 30 percent markup for "convenience fees." I went to the guitar shop in Burlington and placed my order and was issued two tickets for Motley Crue. “Not the Hrew!,” I shrieked. “The Hure!!”

My surgeon and orthodontist were both in Wilmington, three hours from my college. I was never (and still am not) a morning person, but during my senior year, I arranged early morning Tuesday/Thursday classes so I could be on the road by noon in my sad orange car with plastic seats and no air conditioning to be there for 3 p.m. appointments and be back at my apartment by 7 p.m.

I’d finished with the palatal separator, so I was able to give my oral reports with a little more confidence. I did make a big point to grin wide when I had my first legal to buy license picture taken. I still bitched and moaned about having my ID constantly scrutinized when I was buying beer or going to bars. (I wish I could go back and slap 21-year-old me.)

Still had braces when I moved to Raleigh and got my first crappy job. My employers, who paid me a whopping $5 an hour to write biographies, were gracious enough to let me come in at 11:30 on the days leading up to the surgery when I had to go see my doctors in Wilmington, as long as I stayed late to make up my hours. I’d leave Raleigh at 6 a.m. for my 8:30 a.m. appointments and come dashing back.

One time in particular, I came tearing into the parking lot at work and saw black-clad, rifle-bearing swat team members racing across the street. I found the door to the office locked and was reaching for my key when a co-worker opened it and jerked me inside. A wanted murderer was holed up in the motel across the street.

In October, I went in for my pre-op consultation with my surgeon. He told me he hadn’t yet decided whether he would wire my jaws shut after surgery. If I were wired, he explained, I’d have to keep a pair of wire-cutters on me at all times in case I threw up, so I could hack through the wires and prevent a premature rock-star choking-on-vomit death. He also told me to go hog wild and gain 20 pounds, as I would lose that much during recovery and was already very slender. (Again, I would love to go back and slap 22-year-old me.)

My surgery took place over Christmas break that year. I took two weeks off without pay. The surgery involved making diagonal breaks in my lower jaw to slide it forward and secure it with bolts. My chin was to be sawed off across, lifted up and bolted back on. As a bonus, since I was already to be under anesthesia, my surgeon would scrape the cartilage that formed the little parakeet beak that was my nose and reattach it to the tip, giving me a dainty turned-up nose.

I took the single Valium I was prescribed at 4:30 a.m. and my mama drove me from Shallotte to New Hanover Memorial in Wilmington. I changed into a hospital gown and was wheeled to anesthesia. The nice practitioner put the mask over my face and told me to think about the beach. “I don’t really like the beach,” I thought. “I’d rather….”

My next thought was that I really needed to throw up, but I panicked because I didn’t know if my jaws were wired shut. I’m told I sat straight up and spewed projectile blood that had been dripping down into my stomach from my tubes in a 90 degree right-to-left projectory, then passed back out in my recovery-room bed.

My mama was there with me a few hours later when I woke up. She told me I didn’t really need the mirror I was requesting and squirted water into my parched mouth. Unfortunately, I had no feeling in my bottom lip, and the repeated water squirts dribbled down my chin, causing a horrible rash.

Tonya, my best friend, came to see me the next day. My mama left the room and Tonya started crying. I hadn’t had access to a mirror yet.

After two days in the hospital bed, I was allowed to get up and go to the bathroom on my own and saw the horror first hand. Both my eyes were blackened, my face was swollen to "Mask"-like proportions (Lord forgive me for making that comparison), my lips chapped and bleeding, and my chin was raw and blistered.

The following day, I was released. My mama had bought me one of those early 90’s shiny nylon windsuits. I normally would have rejected that outfit outright, but I didn’t have to pull it over my comically huge head. So I sported it with my Doc Martens.

I spent Christmas in bed in Shallotte with my mama’s overweight ginger cat. The television in the room wasn’t hooked up to cable, and it didn’t have a remote, so I watched a lot of local programming and “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

All I could think about was how filthy my hair was, so against doctor's orders I took a bath. I laid back in about four inches of water and worked shampoo into my hair. But my head was so huge and heavy I couldn't sit up. Not wanting my mother to see me naked, though she gave birth to me and had overseen my catheter a few days earlier, I just laid there as the water got cold. After a while, I was able to perform a great act of gymnastics and rearranged my body 180 degrees so that my head was under the faucet and I could rinse out the shampoo. I reached up and turned off the water. My hair was nearly dry and my body temperature was probably falling dangerously low before I was able to hoist myself up and out of the tub. That was probably the first time in my life I was grateful that nobody was paying attention to me.

Two days after Christmas, my mama took me to my follow-up appointment with the surgeon and he gave me the all-clear to go back to Raleigh. Before she drove me back, mama took me to the GNC at Independence Mall to get my quick-weight-gain powder and supplements. Mama was still using a cane from getting hit head-on a few years earlier and I had a big pumpkin head and two black eyes. A woman in the mall approached me, put her hand sympathetically on my arm, and asked what happened to us. “Cosmetic surgery,” I replied.

Rexy was ready and waiting with lots of high-calorie blender recipes to supplement my regimen of Ensure and baby food. One afternoon, he came home with a big Bojangle’s bag and I whimpered. He put some chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy in the food processor and gave me the dinner for which I will always be most grateful. Rexy did such a good job with the high-calorie food that he gained 20 pounds as I lost 20 pounds.

In the meantime, I resumed my life with two black eyes and a huge, swollen, chapped face. Tonya and I had a blast going to the store and making up stories to tell the nosy strangers who asked what was wrong with me. “Stepped on a rake.” “Jail beating.” “Alien abduction.”

When I drove down to Wilmington for my follow-up appointment two weeks later, my surgeon decided I wasn’t taking my soft-food diet seriously enough and wired my jaws shut. I drove straight to work and a co-worker asked me how I was doing. I shrugged and smiled. “If you don’t feel like talking, just say so,” she said snottily. So I scribbled an apologetic note and asked her to tell everybody else (this occurred in the days before interoffice e-mail).

I was only wired shut for a week, but OMG, it was the longest week of my life. I couldn’t say a word. If you know me personally, you can immediately grasp the difficulty that week presented me. I couldn’t smoke, so I had Rex exhale his second-hand smoke directly into my face. Rexy changed the answering machine to let callers know I couldn’t speak. I walked around with a notepad, and on a trip to the mall I ran into a high-school classmate and had to write him notes. (Saw him again at the 20-year reunion and we laughed about that.)

Got unwired, stuck to my soft-food diet and completed my follow-ups for the next few weeks. Had the wire stitches pulled out of my nostrils and will always use that as a benchmark for pain.

The following summer, when I was 23, I was back to normal and had my braces removed and a permanent retainer was placed on my bottom teeth. I popped it out and had it replaced twice before I gave up.

Two years later, I had a painful bulge along my bottom jaw. I figured it was a wisdom tooth coming through and made an appointment with my oral surgeon. He did an x-ray, then removed the bolt that had worked its way out. My sister Jill found this hilarious and reminded me over and over that I’d had a screw loose in my head.

It’s now 16 years since my surgery. I’m pain-free in my neck and head, I have a bit of a chin to speak of, my teeth fit together and I like my nose. Unfortunately, my bottom front teeth moved right back into their chaotic, crooked mess. More power to them, I say. I’m not touching them again. I think they have character. And I married an Englishman.

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