Rachel Nabors

Fix Rachel's Wonky Mouth: A Donation Drive

Donations Accepted

Look how far we've come already.

My surgery and braces will cost between $15,000 and $25,000 dollars. At the encouragement of others, I have set up a special PayPal account that will be used exclusively to pay for the costs of surgery and follow-up care. Leigh Dragoon has kindly agreed to audit. We are hoping to give away shirts with $25+ donations, so please specify your shirt size in men's or women's. Also, if you donate $100+, I'm going to send you an art card to a say super-big thank you. Plus some other kindly folks have offered incentives of their own. Donate anything and get a special (My Little Pony) wallpaper from Kimono's Townhouse, $10+ and Lea Hernandez will put you in a Rumble Girls story, $10+ and Therese will make you fancy art, and if you buy Mike Aragona's novel, and he'll send me the royalties. Conditions apply. Follow links for details.

The Backstory

When I was fourteen or so, I fell on the stairs and into my mouth. I knocked out a tooth, pushed another one up, it was awful. Even had to get a root canal later. But nobody took x-rays of my jaw, or they might have seen that it had been damaged. Nobody noticed it slowly growing longer on one side, not until my bite was off by one tooth. By then, I was an adult, and simple braces would be unable to help me. I would need orthognathic surgery.

Broken Face

The following is almost a direct copy of the first blog post I made about this that started the donation drive. Originally I was just mouthing off about how the System fails hardworking people. I never expected all this to happen. Thank you so much.

I went to the orthodontist for a consultation. It was two years or so ago that I had had my last one. I couldn't afford the procedures described then, and now that I live on my own, I still can't afford them. But my dental hygienist had remarked that my jaw bones were thinning, a very bad sign of improper wear, and I decided to get a second opinion on correcting my cross bite. Here's some of the photos they took with notes by me. I think it was very nice of them to make sure I could take these home with me.

Don't say you don't notice it.
Nothing infuriates me more than when I am describing my plight, and someone says, Oh gee, I don't notice a problem. You look fine.

It's not about how my teeth look to other people. I like my body and don't give a toot what you think about my teeth. It's about the pain I feel when I talk for longer than five minutes at conventions. It's the popping in my jaw I get when eating baby carrots. It's the thinning bones that will cause my teeth to fall out. I could care less about how it looks. I care about how it feels, and right now, it hurts. And it will only get worse. And if I don't act very soon, my jaws bones will thin to the point where braces will be very risky and I may not be able to have the procedure done at all.

Recently I heard a man going on about how people can pick themselves up out of the mud, how young people don't have to care about health insurance, and why should he pay taxes to assist lazy people? I nearly slapped him. As a young person living from paycheck to paycheck, I have no way of fixing this problem in a timely manner.

I am trying to find a way, but we're talking about $15-25,000. Let me write that out: fifteen to twenty-five thousand dollars. You could put a down payment on a house with that kind of money or buy a nice new car or spend years in college getting a shiny degree to get a real job to pay for that procedure (although by that time my jaw will be too thin). I don't have a fraction of that in savings.

No, I don't have health insurance, because I cannot afford it. And even if the state would pick me up as a charity case, I now earn too much to be eligible. I don't think they could do massive surgery at the local health clinic anyway. This is usually considered unnecessary plastic surgery by health insurance and government agencies, even though it could mean the loss of my teeth in the long run.

Never before have I understood the desperation that leads people to steal and rob. I wouldn't do these things, but I realize that these people are not evil, not cruel. They're sad and desperate. They are humans, too, and they just don't see a way out.

The Procedure

I will start the process sometime after July when I know where I'll be for the next two years. Once the process starts, I need to stick to the same area until it's finished, and there's no stopping once I get going. I have to be able to afford to finish it, because if I quit halfway I could be worse than when I started.

The procedure will involve three people, a dentist, an orthodontist and an orthognathic surgeon, all working in concert. My orthodontist will start straightening my teeth with metal braces. After one year or so of straightening, the orthognathic surgeon will see me. After making casts of my bone structure, she will operate on my face, most likely by cutting my jaw and shaving off bone to shorten it on the long side, then bolting it back in place. The screws will probably stay, and I will look like Quasimodo for some time after the surgery.

This is like having plastic surgery done. A lot of people think that the doctors who remove your wisdom teeth can do this, but it is a major under-the-knife surgery. If it isn't done right or well, you can have all sorts of complications.

Then I get an extra year of braces and follow-up treatment. All of it will be very uncomfortable and sometimes painful, but I want to keep my teeth.

Link to the Drive!

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