66 Days Out (or 5,702,400 seconds)

Hello blogosphere!

Today is the 6th day after the plate removal and the 66th day after the surgery. I hope nothing bad happens, what with all those 6s...

Anyway, I went to the orthodontist yesterday, and he put a wire in my upper teeth for the first time in 67 days. Dr. Voorhees segmented my upper jaw, so the middle four teeth were kind of moved up and around and stuff... it's hard to describe. But, it's now Dr. Ramsay's job to pull them down in line with the rest of my mouth. He's doing it super carefully, though, I have to go and see him in a week and keep my retainer in all the time. Don't want my face collapsing in on itself! Haha, jay-kay, ell-oh-ell.

Back into Dr. Voorhees on Monday, more updates then! Until then, here's a bite close-up. I don't have any food in my teeth, those are just gaps for Dr. Ramsay to fill. It's weird to have gaps, I've had like, 6 teeth pulled because my mouth was too crowded, now it's super roomy. Neat!

I was going to post a 'before' picture, but then I found some pictures I took of my smile/teeth before I had braces on, and then I made myself depressed, so I'm not going to perpetuate that.

Have I mentioned that I can't wait to get my braces off?

Me as Thing 2 for Halloween at work

5,270,400 seconds (61 Days)

Yesterday was the 61st day, the 2 month marker of the big surgery. One more month before I hit the 3 month mark where "95% of my healing will be done." Although, I'm not sure how this plate removal is going to throw things off.

Anyway, here's what I remember about yesterday:

• 7:30am wake up and shower
• 8am arrive at Dr. Voorhees's office
• 8:05am go back to the room
• 8:10 Dr. Voorhees puts in my IV and tells me I'll start to feel relaxed soon and I say "In theory" and Dr. Voorhees laughs and says "In practice." I start to feel kind of sleepy
• Some short time after that: I check with Dr. Voorhees to make sure they're not going to leave me in the room alone to get used to the drugs, because that's what the other office did when they extracted my teeth last year, they left me alone in a room, hooked up to NO2, and I had a panic attack. I don't remember him answering this question. 
• 10am I'm in the recovery room and have the extreme urge to throw up. I'm handed a blue plastic barf bag and proceed to throw up the contents of my stomach, which wasn't much, because when they're going to IV sedate you, there are eating rules. There was a guy next to me recovering from what I assume was wisdom teeth extraction, and his wife was sitting next to him, and they had a baby, which would not stop making noise. Coming down from drugs is kind of like a migraine. You just want everything dark and quiet so you can go to sleep. Well, at least they didn't protest when I asked Jared to turn off the TV.
• 10:15am we head home, trusty vomit bag in hand
• 10:30am we arrive home, I make it back to my green chair (oh, how I love/hate you green chair!), and I vomit up some more. I think I got a little car sick on top of the drug stuff. I then take a little nap. 
• 12pm I wake up, then wake Jared to ask if he's hungry - this is just my polite way of asking Jared to get or make me some food. What I really want is some tortilla soup from Santa Rita, where Jared works. He reluctantly agrees to go up there after dropping this bombshell on me: no chewing for a week! What?! That wasn't part of the deal. But, Dr. Voorhees told Jared that it's to let the stitches to their thing.
• 1pm Jared returns with soup but insists on blending it because of the no chewing thing (their tortilla soup is kinda chunky). I protest, because it looks like somebody already ate it and then puked it up in my bowl, but then eat it and it still tastes good.
• 1:30pm I fall back asleep after taking the one and only Trammadol that I've had to take for this part. 
• 4:30pm I wake up and spend the rest of the night resting and watching TV. 

And like I said, I've only had to take the one pain pill. It really doesn't hurt at all. Although, I'm not moving my mouth hardly at all, so that's probably helping. And yesterday when we went to HEB, it kind of started pounding, so I think a lot of movement (and therefore increased heart rate) isn't too good for it. It actually looks a lot worse than it is, it just looks like I'm walking around with a golf ball in my cheek. Maybe I can pretend that I'm chewing tobacco or gum, which makes me fit in well with all the World Series craziness.

51 Days: Follow Up Number 2,340,892 and a half

I feel like I've been split in two, and half of me feels like I've been doing this forever and the other half just feels like the surgery was last week and I'm still a ways away from being healed.

Anyway, yesterday I had another follow up with Dr. Voorhees. We will definitely be taking the plate out next Friday, because while it is no longer inflamed and bothering me (thanks to the Peridex rinse), it is still exposed, which is kind of bad when it comes to bones and such. I'll skip breakfast and lunch, go in at 1:30, he'll drug me up, cut open my face again, unscrew the plate (he told me I can keep it, yay/gross!), and then I get to go home and have a really crappy weekend. But he has assured me that it's not even as bad as a tooth extraction, so we'll see.

My bands are lighter and much more optional now, I can start sleeping on the side of my face again (hallelujah! apparently I'm the only person ever who can't sleep on her back), and my diet is almost unrestricted. I just have to stop when it hurts. Which is just general good advice to follow.

Stellar photography 10/14/11

My newest issue is my right "cheek". I say cheek, because that's what you or I would call it when describing it. Dr. Voorhees calls it my maxilla. It still feels "loose" to me, but Dr. Voorhees got in there and wiggled it around and said it's fine. So, it's still healing, but on track. But, I did start taking some calcium supplements because I'm paranoid.

At this point I am 39 days from the promised 90-day 95% recovered land, so I'm just trying to stay afloat until then. It's weird, stuff you would never think about in your normal life makes it hard to keep up morale after something like this. You think if you can make it through acute yet relatively short initial period, that you won't have problems with the after period, but it's proving to be difficult, just in a different way. Until yesterday, I couldn't sleep normally, I can't eat normally, or talk normally, or even wash my face normally. It's been exhausting, but at least every day is a little better.

Oh yeah, I got a couple awesome bumper stickers over the weekend:

Day 44: 6 Week Report Card

Day 44, which is about halfway toward the big milestone of 90 days. In theory, most of my healing will be done at 90 days, or 3 months. 6 months is when I should expect to see the results I'll see for the rest of my life, but 3 months is when I'll hopefully be all healed up.

Today I had a check up to determine the status of my plate situation and decide what's to be done about that. It's still exposed, so on the 21st of October, my palatial plate comes out. Quoth Dr. Voorhees, "We're not relying on the plates anymore to hold the structure." So, out it comes. The right one will stay in because it's not hurting anything, so we'll just leave well enough alone. I asked if I could keep the plate afterward, and he said sure. So that's cool. A little gross, and I'll probably end up throwing it out eventually, but I just want to see it, you know?

AND the best news of all... I am starting to recover feeling in my left chin & lower lip! I woke up this morning and when when I touch that area (it's the last numb spot left) I get all sorts of spider web tinglies. I haven't talked about it too much because I was really trying not to think about it, but it's not going to be numb forever! Yay!

On another note, I think it's time to stop making excuses about food. It turns out that it's really easy to eat a whole lot of crap when you're on a mushy diet. Especially sugary foods. There was a three week period where I had a slushie from Sonic every day. Other foods that are mushy: brownies, marshmallows, cereal (once it's wet - the best kind is the sugary stuff like honey nut Chex), tater tots... getting the picture? And between that and the altered blood flow, face washing routine plus always wearing my glasses equals some gross skin. So, I'm going to start trying to eat better, because 45 days out from the surgery my excuses are dwindling...

non-sequitur-p.s. honey is just as bad for you as sugar, same with high fructose corn syrup. The only difference is that high fructose corn syrup is so cheap it makes it ubiquitous, and that's what's bad for you, no matter what Vicks or any other organic whatever may try to convince you.

Day the 40th: Activity of the Physical Variety

Today we made a trip over to REI for a new backpack for Jared. Since I use the car every weekday and he's on his bike, he uses a backpack kind of like I use the backseat, just on a smaller scale. Anyway, the point was, while he was backpack shopping, I found a really cool bike helmet that was on sale. I've been biking around the neighborhood almost every night for exercise. I guess before the surgery, my main form of exercise was stress, but I've found the less active I am after the surgery, the worse I feel, both mentally and physically. I guess it's like that normally, but I've been active most of my life, so I just never noticed that being sedentary all the time makes you feel crappy.

I think it helps a lot to make exercise more enjoyable that I can breathe better now. Not only in my throat, but the upper jaw surgery really opened up my... face? I don't know what the correct way to describe it. I guess you could call it my sinuses. Anyway, I get so much oxygen through my nose now it's ridiculous. It wasn't as obvious at the beginning because of all the swelling, but the more that goes down, the more I can tell stuff has changed. My nose seems much wider than it was before, so it's kind of like wearing a BreathRight strip, but just all the time. It's pretty cool. Like LASIK for my nose.

Anyway, I had Jared take a picture of my awesome new helmet right before I rode over to a friend's house to watch Texas play Iowa State. You can still see that unfortunately my smile's a little lopsided. I'm hoping that will get fixed when this whole left side plate issue works itself out, because I look a little like a 24 year old stroke victim. I think it's just because the lower left side is still kind of stiff and swollen from that issue. Also, if you look at my xrays, you can see that the left plate is significantly higher than the right, which is probably why it's not sitting as well.** My whole mouth area just looks bigger, which looks a little funny, but I'm thinking that's just cause I'm not yet used to it. It's definitely more functional, which is obviously the more important part.  Also in the xray, you can see all the freaky screws along my sinus area. I was trying to describe it to Jared today, because there is a little "looseness" - nothing bad, Dr. Voorhees checked when I asked about it - along the upper right jaw. That word, "looseness" doesn't sit well with Jared though, so I tried to elaborate, and after some thought, the only way I could describe it other than that was "It feels like somebody cut into the bone of your upper jaw, moved it, then put it back together with a bunch of tiny screws." Haha - aren't I so creative? But really, imagine that, and that's really what it feels like. At least it's not painful anymore!

** I think I may be overestimating the power of the plates, because when I asked Dr. Voorhees if it would weaken the left side if we took out the plate, he said not at all. I think the word "plate" is a little misleading. It's more like a metal butterfly bandage or something. If he has to take the one on the left out, I'm going to ask Jared to take a picture of it, from a couple angles so we can see what's really in there! It's really neat that the best thing for your body is just your body. It's really better to have the bone all healed up and ready to go than even a titanium plate in there.

Anyway, the further I get away from the surgery and the first week of hell, the more glad I am that I had the surgery. The benefits thus far have been pretty awesome, and they work their way into just about every part of my life. There are some lingering issues, but nothing too big. Still sleeping in my chair (can't put pressure on my jaws, and I am unable to sleep on my back), still numb on the lower left side (although the nerves seem to be waking up little by little), still a little limited diet-wise (although the issues with this are actually less intrusive than my normal diet restrictions, so this part has really been no big deal at all for me), still making the payments (ugh!), and of course, still wearing the braces & palate retainer, but none of those things are unbearable, and they're also all temporary.

**Warning: the below part is kind of mushy, so don't read it if you're not prepared...

I'd like to take a second and thank Jared again for all his support and kindness during this whole process. I already told him he's never allowed to have surgery of any kind because there's no way I could be as strong as he's been. From bringing a sleeping bag to the hospital to stay with me, to holding the bucket while I threw up blood, to waking up without batting an eyelash every 4 hours to administer medicine, to holding my hand while I cried in frustration, to cooking and cleaning and helping with pretty much everything I did without a single hint of complaint, to the weeks after the surgery, when he picks me back up when I get low about the snail's pace the progress is taking, to all the things he does that I don't even see or know about, it has taken what can only be an unimaginable amount of patience and love. Although it's been a long 40 days for me, I'm know it's been just as long for Jared, but you wouldn't know it to hear him talk. I am so blessed to have such a wonderful partner, I can't imagine having done this without him.

39 Days: Healing, But Paranoidally.

Thursday I had another OGS (orthognathic surgery) follow-up appointment. Everything's going well. The incision still hasn't closed. I asked Dr. Voorhees if he could just stitch it up, to help it out, and apparently, that won't work. It's like a drug addict - it has to want to stay together, or it never will. He said next week we'll decide if the plate needs to come out, to which I replied "Well, you'll decide, and I'll most likely agree."

But now that that's been an issue, and I'm starting to be able to "chew" a little more (the 6 week mark is on Tuesday), I have become absolutely PARANOID about something going wrong. I feel like I have to check every little thing all the time. Dr. Voorhees always laughs because every time I come in with a list of questions or comments. Well, the first couple times after the surgery I didn't have a list of questions, and I told him that's how he could know I was feeling back to my normal self, when I brought my list in for the first time after the surgery.

It's weird though, because normally when you're healing or the like, you try to focus on what your body is telling you, and you ajust to that, because body usually knows best. But for some of the stuff on this, it feels weird, but it's supposed to feel weird, because there's a whole new bone structure. So I don't know if it feels weird normal or feels weird bad. That's why I'm glad I see Dr. Voorhees once a week. Honestly, I wouldn't mind going more than that, but I'm pretty sure there's not really a need. Plus I've started seeing my orthodontist again, too, so, checkups all around.

I haven't posted a picture in awhile, because at first, it was like, I didn't care if I looked weird or gross, because there was a reason - it was for science. But now almost all of the swelling is gone, and I look almost back to "normal", but I still haven't gotten the knack of smiling with the remaining numbness and stiffness, plus my mouth is a little lopsided right now as the muscles re-adjust, and it just makes me a little self-conscious. Another ready-made excuse is that pictures always look a little off when you take them yourself, so I like to have Jared take them, and he's not really super pumped about photography, so I have to remember to ask him, and I can conveniently "forget" if I'm feeling a little gloomy that day. BUT I'll try to stop being such a diva and post some pictures soon.