I’m having surgery! Due to medical reasons, it turns out that very soon I will be going under the knife (and hammer) in the form of oral surgery followed by braces. The process is long and daunting (30 months of treatment) but after some alarming discoveries about my dental health I decided that it must be done.
After consulting with my orthodontist I learned that in order to widen my narrow jaw I would have to undergo surgery where they literally break the bone! Yikes! The “bone” being my skull. Funnily enough though, what scared me the most was not the surgery itself but how it could potentially effect my singing voice. Unfortunately for me there are no known cases of singers who chose to undergo this kind of surgery for that simple reason – they were too scared of how it would effect their singing. So, I had to rely solely on the surgeon’s educated guess that it should not change my voice.
Right now I have little rubber rings called “spacers” that have been wedged in between either ends of my second to last molars on my palate. The spacers are there to help create space between those teeth so that they can insert an appliance similar to a retainer called an Expander. Then comes my bone-breaking surgery and braces.
Since there is no real information out there about how this kind of procedure impacts on singers and performers alike I figured it would be a good idea to document and write about my experience for others to perhaps use as a resource.
Brace yourself, the ride is going to be a bumpy one but at least it will be filled with music! Ha!
