What else... I'm still eating mushy foods, but it's a little better I can sort of "gum" at the food now, so while it still has to be soft, I don't have to puree everything. I'm still super sick of sleeping in a recliner, and I cheated a little this morning and slept in bed with like, 4 pillows stacked under my face. I had no idea how much of a luxury sleeping in a bed with pillows is... Also, decided upon a date for my return to the office (I always kind of want to say this in a movie announcer voice, like it's some kind of big event). I'm headed back in on Wednesday, after they take off the splint. But they've been really great about everything, so I'm sure if I get in and it's a little too tiring they'd be flexible with some more working from home.
Oh, and I received a request to talk about why I had the surgery done. The short version first: I had pretty bad malocclusion, meaning my bite didn't line up, and that gave me really bad headaches.
Here is the more extended version:
I had braces when I was younger (for like, 7-8 years!) to correct a severe overbite that I had. My orthodontist recommended I had a couple of my top teeth pulled, and was then essentially pulling the top teeth back to meet the lower teeth. The problem with that approach is that it doesn't really fix the bite. So, fast forward 10 years, and I still have this really bad overbite (although my teeth are really straight), and it's giving me these awful headaches. Because when your jaw doesn't line up properly, the muscles around it have to work a lot harder and get grumpy. And those muscles just happen to be very intimately connected with all the muscles in your head, face and neck that give you headaches. The headaches were so bad that as a 22 year old, I was willing to get braces again. And I'm very vain, so that should tell you something...
Anyway, the headaches were the main impetus for getting the surgery. I read some studies where something like 80-90% of the people who got the surgery for headaches had a significant drop off in headaches after and were super happy that they had had the surgery done. So that was really encouraging.
As I talked with the doctors, there were some other reasons to do the surgery. It is pretty major surgery, and I will never heal faster than I do now, because I'll never be 18 again, so the longer I waited to do the surgery, the worse it was going to be. And the problems that I have would not have corrected themselves, and there's not another way to correct them.
A bad bite also makes eating more difficult (although it's the only thing I've ever known, so we'll see after I get the splint out how much better eating is - but from what I've read, everybody sees a dramatic improvement), and this could possibly be contributing to some of my stomach problems.
Also, because my lower jaw was set so far back, my airway was being constricted. You can see it in the xrays that they took, it's weird. I can't tell now, because it's been so long since I had the surgery, but I remember telling Jared in the first couple days after my surgery that I could breathe so much better than I could before, and that was with all the swelling and the splint and everything, so that's encouraging. If my breathing was compromised, that could have greatly contributed to my anxiety, so that's something that will probably improve.
And the last reason is that having a bad bite is just bad for your teeth and gums. It wears them down more quickly and just leads to all sorts of problems later.
Here are some other fun facts about the surgery: it's much more common for people with an underbite (lower teeth in front of upper teeth) to have the surgery than an overbite (what I had, front teeth dramatically over lower teeth), because having an underbite is much more disruptive to your daily life. Also, my orthodontist told me that a significantly larger number of women have symptoms that lead them to get the surgery than men. So, a man who had the same overbite as I used to have probably would not have suffered as bad (if any) of headaches, and therefore wouldn't have felt the need to have the surgery. The surgery is becoming much more common because of technological advances. A dozen or so years ago, if you had your jaw broken, you would have to be wired shut (and if it happens by accident, you still have to). But when they do the surgery, they use something called "internal rigid fixation" which means that there are screws and titanium plates in between the bones, so that's why I didn't have to be wired shut at all.
It's a really interesting surgery, check out the "The Surgery" tab at the top to read more about it. Here's a pretty descriptive photo of the lower jaw surgery, which is formally known as a bilateral sagittal split osteotomy, because they actually cut down, through the middle of the bone:
No comments:
Post a Comment