Pulling on the hidden one - erupting the tooth

Remember the extraction of my baby tooth?

The gap on the top is the one from where the baby tooth was extracted.
There is a permanent tooth sitting inside that tooth hole which needs to be pulled down..

Now it's time, to put in the instruments which are going to pull that shy fellow down. So, after my dentist performed some clearing out of the gum around the area, she had then put on a bracket on the TINY bit of the permanent tooth that was slightly visible inside - it was quite difficult for her to get to that.

After that, a kind of a rubbery-band was placed on the permanent tooth. A bracket could not be placed on this tooth yet like the ones on the other teeth because only a VERY SMALL portion of this tooth was visible right now and the typical brackets usually require space. So a temporary rubbery-like something was attached on this tooth and it was tied by archwire to the brackets on the teeth on its sides. This would produce a tension from the brackets on the sides of the tooth and that would, eventually, pull the permanent tooth down over time.

So after the pull-down setup was done, this is how it looked.

Am not sure if you can see the permanent tooth there, but it's right there - being pulled down by the archwire.
This is gonna be a long process.

Disclaimer: If anyone is disgusted by these pictures, please press Ctrl+W (or Command+W on Mac)

The process of tooth development in which the teeth enter the mouth and become visible is called tooth eruption - wikipedia. Typically the tooth eruption of both the baby teeth and the permanent teeth has a natural schedule. But in my case, with the baby tooth having stayed for longer than normal, the eruption of the permanent tooth is now being done with artificial means.

Upper jaw wired up

So after I got my overly staying baby tooth removed from my upper jaw and then after getting the brackets for the upper jaw, it was time to wire up the teeth of the upper jaw.

After wiring up the upper braces 

After wiring up the upper braces

Before wiring up the upper braces

Disclaimer: If anyone is disgusted by these pictures, please press Ctrl+W (or Command+W on Mac)

Wires replaced - this time tighter.

So, after i trimmed down the buggy wires the previous night, today i went to my dentist and explained to her what happened. After that, she took off all the wires that were currently tied around my lower jaw and installed new set of wires - this time, they were FURTHER tightened than before.

During this visit, my dentist said that the congestion had noticeably reduced on my lower jaw since the time i put on the braces.

The first time these wires were placed, they were not as tight as they were tied this time. But they felt much more harder during the first time - perhaps because of the first time effect. This time, even though the wires were further tightened than before, they didn't feel much painful.

UPDATE: Changing the wires is a typical process over a monthly basis - not subjective to the issue i described in a previous post about the buggy wires slipping out. Got to learn this from an article on archwired.com which tried to explain the procedure of changing the arch wire on a monthly basis.


The article says:

Every 4 to 6 weeks, you go to your orthodontist to get your braces "tightened" or "adjusted." Sounds awful, doesn't it? Nothing is really "tightened." It's really very simple.