About Corporal Craig Sinclair

I’ll start off with a little background about me. My name is Craig Sinclair. You can hear me on the Clear Channel radio stations around the greater Columbus area during the morning and afternoon drive time. I have been the local traffic reporter now for over 15 years.

I always remember having crooked teeth, my bottom teeth are worse than my top teeth. In fact my teeth are so crowded on the bottom I have one tooth that sits behind another so the one in front has become affectionately known as my “fang”.

If I remember right, I was about 13 or 14 when my mom took me to the dentist to start getting me ready for my braces. I remember getting a couple of teeth pulled in preparation for my braces. Then it all hit me, I was about to become “metal mouth”. All through high school I was gonna have these metal braces in my mouth, and then after that, I was gonna have to wear these fairly unattractive metal retainers. I looked at mom and said, “Forget it, I don’t want these things”……... that was pretty much the start of the rest of my life with crooked teeth.

Jump forward some 25 years later; I’m a 40 something and I started having some problems. Beside the challenge of trying to keep my crowded teeth clean, I started accidentally biting the inside of my lower lip with that “fang” that I mentioned. Usually, it was when I was eating.

You know how it is...you’re eating dinner...you’re chewing your last bite of food...then it happens...BAM! Like a prize fighter with a right hook, it hits you...you bite down and connect with enough force you are sure that tooth is gonna come right through your lip! You ask yourself… “How could I have bitten down so hard ON MYSELF to cause so much pain”? And you know that isn’t going to be the end of it either, NOOOOOoooo...once you do that first one, you do it several more times over the next few days! OUCH!

Another ten or so years go by and now I’m a 50 something. Then, last fall it happens again...another bite to my lip! That is it! I have had it! I have bitten the backside of my lip so much and so hard over the last ten years that I have developed the equivalent of a callous on my lip. Yup, that’s it...”I’m gonna do something about this once and for all”. At that point I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do, but I was done, I’m gonna do something, even if it meant that “fang” was coming out!

Well, turns out, it’s apparently not a good idea to pull that “fang” out after all. Something about the fact that “it would drastically change the look of my face”. (AND It didn’t sound like it would be for the better either)

So, it was time for some soul searching. First, do I just say the heck with it and have that thing pulled and be done with it despite the advice of everyone? Well, after several conversations with my dentist, friends and family; I decided I just couldn’t risk intentionally making myself look any goofier than I already do naturally, so the outer tooth extraction was off the table.

I could just leave it “as is” I mean….after all, I have lived with it this way for all of my adult life. Man, I’m 50...there is no way I’m getting braces. “Metal mouth” in my youth was unacceptable to me, there was REALLY no way I could do it now. Besides, I talk on the radio for a living...how could I do my job with all that tin in my mouth? What would everyone think with me and my “lispy s”? What would ClearChannel think? Braces now? At 50? There is NO way...is there?

So, I’m sitting in the 24/7 traffic center one day doing my traffic thing and I hear a Stone Creek Dental ad running on one of our stations for Invisalign braces. “www.helpmysmile.com” . After browsing around the website for a while I kinda came to the conclusion that hey! these things are pretty cool, these might just be what I’m looking for….no metal in my mouth, in fact, you can hardly see them at all AND if they affect my speech, well, I could just pop them out while I’m on the air...how cool is this?

I can’t help but wonder, will they work for me?...My crowded 50 year old mouth complete with “fang”?

And so my journey begins...

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