The Whining Road to Straighter Teeth

• By MICHELLE SLATALLA

THINGS have gotten a little out of control around here lately in the orthodontics department.

Hadley Hooper

There is constant whining about how much the braces hurt. Paraphernalia — the floss, the wax, the tiny toothbrushes with the extra-soft bristles — litter the bathroom counter. And there are frequent demands for special meals, consisting of “soft entrees” like ice cream.

“Now she’s demanding another banana smoothie,” Clementine, my youngest daughter, complained the other day as she plugged in the blender for yet another batch.

“I know, she was complaining the last one didn’t have enough ice,” Zoe, my eldest daughter, commiserated.

They cast dark looks over their shoulders at the patient, who was sitting slumped and miserable in a kitchen chair.

Me.

“Do my teeth look straighter yet?” I asked, moaning. I had had braces for about three hours.

How did I get myself into this mess? I guess you could say it started when my baby teeth fell out and my grown-up teeth grew in, crossed in front. I am vain and would have begged my parents for braces if not for the fact that in the 1970s an imperfect look was considered attractive, thanks to Ali McGraw’s crooked teeth in “Love Story.”

It wasn’t until recently — after a few more decades of gradual and mysterious shifts that made my teeth look more crooked — when I realized I had made a serious miscalculation. Instead of Ali McGraw’s, my teeth were starting to resemble Austin Powers’s.

Then one day, a couple of years ago, my dentist warned me that my mouth was headed for trouble if I didn’t straighten my teeth.

Crowded teeth are harder to clean, the dentist said. And in a nation where a middle-aged adult like me already has an average of 15 decayed, filled or missing teeth, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I decided it was time to take any steps necessary to prevent a Polident future.

Well, almost any steps. The orthodontist told me all I had to do for “a few months” was to wear clear plastic aligners — practically invisible! — to straighten my teeth. It sounded like a no-lose situation: I felt virtuous for taking steps to improve my health while at the same time I was improving my appearance. How often does that happen? Barring really expensive cosmetic surgery, those of us in our 40s don’t get any opportunities to do something that makes us look better than when we were younger.

But then, reality set in. The practically invisible plastic aligners took a lot longer to fix my teeth than I expected; after two years, a couple of incisors remained stubbornly resistant.

Which is how I found myself trading in the plastic for metal in the middle of the summer of my 48th year, hunched in a chair and whimpering pathetically as I finally began to understand the full scope of the pain and indignity that all my friends from junior high had gone through 35 years earlier.

“Let’s have a look, Metal Mouth,” my husband said, walking into the kitchen. Nonchalantly he took a bite from an apple.

This made me wince.

Everything made me wince. Despite the fact that my case only required me to wear brackets on about half my teeth “for a few weeks,” all my teeth hurt. So did my gums. And lips. And no one in my family seemed to realize the importance of keeping me medicated with calming smoothies.

It didn’t even give me the slightest bit of comfort to learn, after I phoned the president of the American Association of Orthodontists to accuse him of being personally responsible for my pain, that I’m in good company. Across the country, more than a million adults are in braces these days, accounting for about 20 percent of patients wearing “appliances,” as those in the business like to call them.

“More people are walking in and saying, ‘I want to look better,’ ” said Dr. Robert James Bray, the association’s president, who practices in New Jersey. “My oldest patient was 83 when she got braces. You have to admire that. It was like when you run into someone who goes back to school later in life, or says I’m going to learn something new. She did something about her teeth.”

“How old is she now?” I asked.

“In her 90s,” he said.

“And?” I asked.

“Her teeth looked great the last time I saw her,” he said.

Quit whining and take an ibuprofen was the recommendation another dentist I called gave me.

“Oh, wait until you get to be my age, and you start growing things on your face, it’s like having barnacles,” said Dr. Richard Price, 68, a spokesman for the American Dental Association, who extolled the long-term benefits of braces. “Straightening your teeth will make them easier to care for, which will make them last a lot longer.”

That’s something to hold onto, I guess: the prospect of having really straight teeth for a few years before I start getting the various moles, sunspots, warts, skin tags and other lumps that commonly appear on people’s faces as they age.

In the meantime, however, I had to get off the phone because talking made my mouth hurt more.

I decided to give up speaking entirely and to rely, instead, on Twitter to communicate until things improved. Like Oprah.

“I will be tweeting exclusively until I feel better,” I typed as I sat in my office. “Please bring me some iced tea.”

A few minutes later, my husband came downstairs. Without the iced tea.

“Aren’t you taking things a little far?” he asked. “You can’t be in that much pain. You did give birth three times without drugs.”

“That was a mistake, too,” I typed and hit the enter key.

“You know something,” he said, peeling back my lips as a trainer would to inspect a quarter horse, “your teeth are actually starting to look straighter.”

“You think so?” I asked, forgetting to tweet.

“Absolutely,” he said. “You look great, Jaws.”

I flashed a metallic smile, feeling better already. Wait until he sees me in my 90s.

E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com