My first post

Right where do I begin? It is two weeks post op from my SARPE operation, and before I go into that, first and foremost I will give you some background info on how and why it got to this stage.

Note:

Before I continue, my intention of this blog is for it to serve two distinct purposes:

a) Inform those individuals suffering from an Anterior Open-Bite, or Cross-bite of what to expect during THEIR orthodontic journey. I wish I had this information avaliable to me, but I had to search long and hard on google to educate myself about my condition.

b) To give those that are interested an insight on what it was like going through this. I am hopeful that after reading this you will go away feeling much more aware of orthodontics surgery and the work that is done during it.

*) As I know people are generally lazy when it comes to reading vasts amounts of material, to avoid repetition I will add material, text, photos to my existing posts. This will save me from repeating myself as this should make this blog concise and straight to the point as well as user friendly - in the sense that you don't have to go sniffing through 10000 posts to see what the deal is!

Now back to my little story, a combination of mouth breathing, excessive sweets caused me to lose my baby teeth very early at the age of 5. This along with thumb sucking had a negative impact on my bite. The mouth breathing had an affect by causing me to" develop long face syndrome"; where my face is quite long, whilst the thumb sucking was responsible for my upper jaw to be very narrow which resulted in the development of a cross-bite. Due to the combination of both, this inevitably resulted with myself developing an Anterior Open Bite. An othodontic term to describe when your upper and bottom teeth do not touch.

It is often argued that this is caused by genetical reasons, and although this may be the case for many, given that many members of my immediate/extended family do not suffer from this condition I doubt that this was the case for me.

Unaware until the age of 19 of my malocclusion (improper bite), due to not knowing any better. It was only after my first trip to Scotland prior to choosing my University, that my Uncle Tony pointed out that I should get braces fitted in. After a short trip to the dentist to address this, my dentist referred me to the orthodontics department at Kings and then the next stage of my battle began, getting treatment started to correct my bite. This I will address in my next post.

References:

http://www.answers.com/topic/long-face-syndrome

For a brief History of the development of Orthodontics go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodontics