The Brace Faced Kiwi

OK, so it's been a really long time since I posted. It's not that the time's gone quickly, it's that over the last few months I've grown to dislike my smile almost more than I did before I started treatment. At the beginning of the year, my ortho stopped part way through replacing the ligs on the top arch (I mean he really did put 4 of them on) then said out of the blue, "that black triangle is bugging me", pulled hard on the archwire and started to do IPR. This happened all in the space of a minute and I was so shocked I just didn't say anything, all the time running through my mind was how could he do this well with the archwire in place and that I hoped he doesn't ruin the look of my front teeth as he didn't seem to be thinking too much about what he was doing.

I checked my teeth in my rear view mirror as soon as I got in the car and immediately saw white scratches on my tooth, and that he had reshaped only one tooth, not a bit off each like I thought he would, and they now looked totally wrong. It's hard to explain, but one of the teeth was ever so slightly larger than the other before, and the tooth he shaved was the smaller one, making something barely noticecable that I didn't mind, VERY noticeable. I figured that he'd fix it over time, and I have tried to get over that disappointment. The next month, the ortho mentioned that I was doing so well, he thought I might be able to get my braces off as early as July. I was excited as I thought, I'd finally be getting my last molar bands, and the rest of the IPR he'd talked about me needing, and would fix those front teeth. That month he replaced my wire and I was quite excited.

Except, since then the new wire caused my teeth to come completely out of alignment, opened up 4 new gaps in the top and caused my rear molars to come even more misaligned with my arch than they were before. Since that adjustment in feb he's made no adjustments other than adding a powerchain to close the gaps this month, and only then after a visiting ortho mentioned how big they were (he had the ligs out and ready to put on before he swapped over).

Here's where I've lost faith completely; in the last month since the chain was put on, my teeth have taken on a slant and my midline on top is now at an angle, which I'm sure is because of that IPR'd tooth. As well as this, my misaligned bite is causing my TMD to flare terribly and I'm living with constant jaw pain and headaches, which are getting worse by the week. I'm terrified that he's going to say I'm having them off next month (like he mentioned in January) as I feel I've spent $6K on getting a whole new kind of unstraight teeth and while I know the front alignment could be fixed in that time, there's no way one adjustment can fix my rear molars which still flare and are now on average .5 cm outside of the rest of my arch. I feel even more depressed looking back at previous photos, and wishing I could go back to how they looked 6 months ago, where I might have been frustrated with the lack of changes, but was overall, really happy with how my teeth looked.

This photo, shows my last adjustment. If you look hard, you can see that they were at a very very slight, barely noticeable angle - take note of the tooth he shaved:
This is my new alignment:


And here's a side by side comparison:


Notice the red line? That traces the edge of that tooth. If I were to draw a line down the middle, that tooth encroaches the midline by around 1ml to 1.5ml due to it's slant.

So that's where I'm at now. Desperately unhappy with my smile and trying to work up the courage to talk to my ortho at my adjustment this week. I know I have to, and I know I've been putting it off for 3 months, which I should never have done. My excuse is I was waiting for him to notice and to fix these problems himself, in reality it looks like he's not as attentive as I thought he was at the beginning.