Getting braces removed calls for a William Wallace ‘Freedom’ shout

I sort of relived this week the scene in “Braveheart” where Mel Gibson’s William Wallace character has his intestines removed by his captors in hopes he’ll confess his sins, except I didn’t have my intestines removed, I wasn’t being tortured and nobody was trying to get me to confess my sins.


But I was lying down and I did have something extracted, and when it was done I wanted to yell “Freedom,” much like Wallace actually did do during the scene.

My moment of almost mirroring “Braveheart” took place Monday when the braces I’ve been wearing for the past year and a half were removed, returning freedom to my mouth.

Wearing braces for the past 18 months has been a chore. I’ve been limited in the foods I can eat, although I haven’t always followed some of those limitations as popcorn will never leave my diet.

Braces also occasionally hurt. When they shifted my teeth around, my lips and inner mouth often had to adjust to sharp edges piercing into their soft tissues, often making me whine to my wife. And she’ll admit that I’m usually pretty good about sucking up any pain and not complaining about it.

They also gave me trouble when I tried to pronounce certain big words. In a class at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, I often was faced with many big words, some containing many “s” sounds that often tangled with my braces. Fortunately my professor understood my difficulty, as she also had braces as an adult.

Adult braces are worth these costs, though, especially when you had a gap between your front teeth that could have fit the Titanic. I feared smiling in public, scared the draft coming from the gap as my mouth went in an upward motion would knock whomever I was smiling at down. That’s probably not a good way to meet someone.

My wife is now saying I can’t stop smiling, and that I look like the Cheshire Cat – devious and mischievous looking. I can understand, as I’m not quite sure how to smile properly yet. Right now my teeth-showing smile is a cross between Tom Cruise’s perfect smile and Charles Manson’s bug-eyed serial-killer smile. I’ll call it a Charles Cruise smile.

I’ll keep trying to get the Tom Cruise smile. I have the rest of my life to gladly practice.
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Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Jan. 20, 2012.