Emily Luck – My Teeth Saga

Emily Luck – My Teeth Saga

If you’ve been around here for awhile then you probably already know about the way my luck works.

I tend to have things go wrong and then work out ok in the end. (My lasik saga is a great example…as is “face gate”)

It just takes me a few bumps in the road to get to where I want to be and I’m basically never surprised by it anymore.

If most people have a smooth path for something, I can almost always count on being in the small percent that has an issue.

The upside of having this sort of luck is that I typically have a fun story I can laugh about once it’s all resolved.

Enter the latest Emily Luck story for your enjoyment: my teeth.

Growing up my biggest insecurity was my smile.

A gap between the front two teeth is a VERY strong heredity trait in my family. My brother has it, my dad has it, his mom had it…and my grandmother on my mom’s side ALSO had it.

I would look in the mirror to practice smiling to avoid my teeth showing.

It makes me sad to see older pictures of myself where I can tell I’m trying not to just SMILE my natural smile!

It was tricky for me to even find pictures that show my teeth and what they looked like:

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At that time my dentist was confident that braces wouldn’t keep the gap shut. It was too large and I had too much spacing and it was such a strong gap that it would probably reopen.

The two teeth beside my front two were also a good bit smaller and braces wouldn’t fix sizing.

My dad and I decided to look into other options and when I was 19 I got veneers.

My front four teeth were replaced with the veneers and I LOVED THEM.

I smiled MY SMILE without being embarrassed or having to think about how to smile in just the right way to not hate the way I looked.

I seriously loved the end result and have continued to love my teeth even 15 years later.

This is a great “after” of my veneers, taken about 4 years after I got them.

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Veneers are not a permanent fix. Over time they shifted some.

I was wrestling with Kye once and his head connected with my teeth and BAM I got a gap again, instantly, between the front two teeth.

I wore a retainer for several months and then an orthodontist put wiring between the four teeth to keep them together.

Over time I could tell my teeth were starting to age.

My front two started to discolor and I started to resort right back to those teenage insecurities about my smile and not loving my teeth.

With veneers the color is permanent, meaning you can’t bleach them.

The discoloration happened from behind the veneer, not on top. So the only route to take was to have them replaced.

You can kinda tell the discoloration here! Usually in pictures it wasn’t noticeable so it helped me not feel AS insecure about it.

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In November 2019 I started the process to replace my veneers.

Here are the before pictures of my old veneers:

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I was TERRIFIED about getting rid of my teeth.

Even though I hated the discoloration and knew it was time to replace them…I still loved them.

I was nervous I wouldn’t love the end result as much as I loved my teeth the first time.

Which granted, was going to be a challenge.

When I first got them I HATED my smile. So I was THRILLED when I got new teeth! It was truly a game changer for my self confidence!

But this time I was replacing something I LOVED and it’d be dang near impossible for me to be overjoyed at the end result.

The first phase was to remove the old veneers in order to make the molds for the laps to create the new ones.

I had to be driven to and from and appointment as I was on some decently strong meds to help me not really be “all there” during the whole process:

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It would take a few weeks for the new teeth to come back and in the meantime I had to have temporaries.

I had to do this same thing the first time around and have no real memories of the temporaries I wore back then.

I remember they were natural looking and I wasn’t insecure about them or bothered by them so I wasn’t overly concerned about having them again.

YALL. NOPE.

I was NOT happy. No way was I wearing these temporaries for FIVE WEEKS. NO. WAY.

I typically am very trusting of people with authority or who have more knowledge about something than I do.

I tend not to speak up or have strong opinions and just trust people.

It gets me burned pretty frequently so I’ve gotten better about speaking up and not just going with the flow about stuff.

I was proud of how I handled this teeth situation because I simply told them I was not going to wear these horrible temporary teeth and that they needed to be redone. STAT.

Here we go again!

I heavily debated hopping on IG Stories looking like this but decided against it, which I’m glad for that decision.

Here’s the thing…you won’t see me on IG pointing out my flaws or insecurities.

If you talk about your flaws…it only makes people notice them more. Even if I make a typo (IG is the worst with auto correcting things wrong) I never post another slide to fix the error.

Because yall. MOST PEOPLE DO NOT NOTICE.

If you point out the error or the flaw or the insecurity THEN they notice it!

So I never talked about my teeth at ALL in this ENTIRE saga and guess what?

I never got a single DM asking me about my teeth (which I know yall are probably thinking “who would dm you about your teeth?” TRUST ME I dms about allllll kinds of stuff. If I get my hair trimmed people notice haha!).

I knew if I said something about my teeth to people that it would only cause me to be MORE insecure about it.

So I tried my best in this whole process not to think about my teeth and told very few close friends about the whole thing and that’s it.

I just rolled with it!

The new temporaries were MUCH better!

We even had our family photos taken the next day and I LOVE the photos and am totally happy with the way my smile looks in them 🙂

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The molds were sent off to the lab to begin making my new teeth on November 14th.

It was supposed to take 5 weeks to have them back.

They didn’t come in until JANUARY 27th.

Good thing I was okay with the temporaries…but that’s a LONG time to be in temporary teeth!

I went back into the dentist to remove the temporaries and put in my new veneers!

And. I didn’t love them.

They were OKAY but I was spending a LOT of money and I didn’t want to spend the next 20 years being the least bit insecure about my smile.

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So. They sent them BACK to the lab. I was promised it would not take as long this time.

And they put my same temporaries BACK on.

The same ones that I’d been wearing since mid-November.

For Valentine’s Day we alway take the kids on little date nights with us and Kye and I were excited to dress up nice and have a fancy dinner date at a local Italian restaurant on Feb 6th (Mom and Dad’s if you’re local)

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Kye and I sat down and orderer our meals.

We got Shirley temples to drink and our salads arrived and we were talking about basketball season.

I took a bite of their ULTRA SOFT bread and bit down on something hard.

At first thought I thought they had large pieces of garlic or pepper or something in their olive oil.

And then it hit me.

I was BITING INTO MY TEETH.

My temporaries had completely come out. Into my mouth. And I’d chewed them.

Not only was it 5:30 PM, which was after the dentist was closed, but it was also a night that we had CRAZY BAD storms in our town.

Like Zach had picked up the kids from school because it was SO windy I was nervous about them riding the bus that afternoon.

So basically our town was shut down for the night and I was literally holding my teeth in my hands.

I clasped my hand over my mouth because I didn’t want to scare Kye.

I told him I had to run to the bathroom.

It’s one thing to look like this at the dentist fr a few minutes when you’re about to have teeth put back on…it’s another to be at a nice restaurant.

I called the dentist even though I knew they’d be closed.

I then called Zach and had him start to try to get ahold of the dentist after hours line while I figure out what to do about dinner.

I felt SO BAD to have to tell Kye we needed to leave.

But not only did I look a fright…it was also impossible to eat and was painful to talk or drink because those little nubs of teeth were super sensitive.

It was hilarious when the waitress came over to check on us.

I pointed to my teeth on the bread plate and, while covering my mouth with my hand, told her my teeth had fallen out and we needed to leave.

I dropped Kye at home and then threw on comfortable clothes and headed to the dentist.

I sat outside their office for an hour just hoping someone would show up to help me.

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Spoiler alert: they didn’t.

Due to the bad weather the dentist wasn’t able to find an assistant to come up there and they told me I’d have to come back the next morning.

It was a rough night!

I went back home and when I tucked the kids in Kye kept telling me how sorry he felt for me. He was sad we didn’t have our date but especially just felt bad for me going through all of that.

Tess asked to see my teeth and when I showed her she gasped and said “you’re so creepy mommy! You look SO CREEPY!”

And when I went to tuck Britt in she said “I’ve just had such a bad day”

I about died – I asked her “Baby, do you have all your teeth right now? Then your day wasn’t so bad!” haha!

I went back to the dentist the next morning and they basically glued the temporaries back together so they’d stay put until the veneers arrived.

Same temporaries…3 MONTHS after I got them originally.

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Kye and I were able to redo our fancy dinner date night and I was just SUPER careful while eating.

I cut up everything and didn’t use my front teeth at ALL.

Even with being careful, those temporaries were just shot.

They started chipping away and I had all these rough parts of them that constantly bothered me and rubbed my tongue raw.

I was SO eager for the 2nd set of veneers to come in, but I also went in assuming I wouldn’t like them and told the dentist if they needed to be redone that I would be needing a new set of temporaries.

When they removed those temporaries they told me they literally fell apart.

Praise Jesus because I did NOT want to see those things EVER again!

Thankfully I really liked the veneers! FINALLY!

We had a really hard time getting them on. My poor gums have just been through so much that they didn’t want to go through anything else and were very swollen.

I went home super happy…but woke up the next morning super upset.

Hello GAP LIFE again. It wasn’t a horrible gap between the front two teeth but, again, I wasn’t about to go 20 years with a gap!

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Thankfully it was just my gums being swollen still and it took some time to calm down and settle!

I was so nervous I’d have to get these sent back to the lab and have to continue the saga.

Thankfully just a few days prior to the world shutting down I got the all-clear from the dentist that my x-rays showed the teeth settled correctly and were aligned properly and I’m good to GO for hopefully the next 20-30 years 😉

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Up until this whole saga situation I’d always said if my kids had the “Sedgley Split” that I’d go the veneer route for them too…but I think the moral of this story is we’ll go for braces first 😉