I’ve had mine on since February. My husband had his put on a couple of months later.
My experiences so far -
I had a really bad head cold when I had mine applied, so I was pretty miserable during that session and after. It definitely would not have been as terrible if I wasn’t already feeling so shitty and achy. That appointment was probably about an hour and a half long, but I think the actual gluing of the brackets was about half an hour or so.
Once they were on, my mouth and teeth didn’t really hurt that day. They just obviously felt bound, constricted, tight. I felt a little claustrophobic.
The next 2 days they hurt. Really, really achy. Like someone had somehow kicked me in the teeth in my sleep without my knowing it until I woke up and felt like…someone had kicked me in the teeth.
But I got used to them, and so did my husband, and so will you.
We go in for adjustments every 5 weeks or so (I have one tomorrow, he has one Friday.) My teeth will ache the day of and after an adjustment, but Advil helps, and I just eat soft foods for a couple of days.
Advil helps me A LOT. I keep some handy at all times now.
Tough and chewy foods are the ones I really need to stay away from - no beef jerky, no tootsie rolls or anything like that. Cold helps with the pain after an adjustment. I didn’t even want to THINK about eating an apple or corn on the cob or a carrot or anything crunchy or even remotely hard after getting them on put on, and the same holds true for after adjustments.
Both my husband and I each have one of these WaterPiks and I don’t know if I’d be able to stand flossing without it. Buy one now.
Wax helps when something is rubbing the wrong way against your cheeks.
I’m glad I’m having this done, and I’ll be even more glad once they are off, and I am so thankful my husband decided to do this with me so I can whine a little and at least get some sympathy, but I have to say, if I’d known what a pain in the ass they’d be, I would have shelled out the extra cash for Invisalign. I’ve got several co-workers with braces, or who have had braces recently, and one of them went the Invisalign route. She’s almost done, and with almost none of the stuff I hate about having them on.
The only other thing I can think of is, if you’re getting brackets that will require colored bands over them (I have them, my husband does not, and his brackets are slightly smaller than mine), avoid the clear bands, or white or yellow. They’ll stain and end up looking terrible. I didn’t have to find this out the hard way, thankfully. The techs at the office warned me away from them.