undividedspirit

Woah this one was scary! I prayed and prayed and asked questions of all the right people. All the wrong people also offered me their opinions too. I have been uncomfortable with TMJ, what felt like a too small space for my tongue and increasingly, headaches, for years. The recommendation was 2 years of braces and a maxillary and mandibular osteotomy (double jaw surgery). This came as unwelcome news after a hysterectomy but at the same time I was eager for some kind of relief. After 11 months of braces it was time for the surgery.

Before surgery:

Day 1: An early start. We had to be at the hospital at 6am! The check in was very quick, only about an hour of waiting in pre-op, which didn’t really feel like waiting as you are having your blood pressure checked, answering the nurse’s questions, talking to the anesthetist, saying hello to your Doctor and then in you go. I was in the OR for 30 seconds and then I was “out”. I remember being wheeled to the ward but not the actual waking up after the surgery. Then I remember waking up and seeing my husband and the ward RN. They pulled the pipe out of my stomach through my nose which was a lot of fun (not!) but over very quickly. My major complaint with the hospital was every few minutes someone else would come in wanting to do something to me. They had trainee nurses there so I’d get my BP taken and 10 minutes later one of the trainees would be in asking if they could take my BP. I even had trainee nurses coming in to ask me if I could feel my toes – no jokes. So they woke me more than every hour but they did keep me topped up on pain meds. The RN cleaned my nose that first day with huge Q-tips, pulling out blood and gunk. That was actually rather nice, if you can believe it. Day 2 was more of the same.

Day 3: Home time and shower time. Oh my goodness. I had a plastic garden chair in the shower so I could sit down in case of dizziness which I loved, I sat there for ages letting the hot water run over me. Pure bliss. A little bit more sleep than in hospital but still I was awake a lot, replacing the ice packs, getting more medication. There are a lot of different medications to remember and they all get taken at different times. Your antibiotics are every 4 hours, nasal spray twice a day, nasal decongestant every 6 hours, pain meds every 6 hours and for some reason I ended up on a different cycle with the pain meds and decongestant. Easy to remember to take pain meds and the decongestant because you can feel you need them; basically the antibiotic got forgotten a lot.

Day 4: My gut was one of the victims in this saga with constipation for the first 3 days which I didn’t really care about, followed by crazy gas pains which I really did care about.I was drinking miralax (a stool softener) but nothing was happening, except for the pains, so my husband went to the pharmacy to get me something stronger. The pharmacist recommended magnesium citrate which is what you drink before a colonoscopy to clean out your system. I should have asked my Dr’s assistant first but I drank about one third of the bottle (you have to drink the whole bottle for the real “clean out” but I just wanted to “go”). The gas pains continued to escalate until my husband called the Dr’s assistant that evening who said “Don’t drink that stuff”; uh, too late! She said to ride it out, it would happen, and eventually it did, much later that night. Not my best day so far.

Day 5: I stopped taking the Tylenol with codeine because I wanted my stomach to return to normal. I was fine without the codeine, I did have more pain, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Today was the first day I felt like consuming any calories whatsoever. The day before with my stomach, it was a struggle to drink my “green juice” and a protein shake. Today I had the green juice which my husband makes for me:
Green juice recipe:
Half a bunch of kale
1 Zucchini
A quarter of a lemon
About an inch squared of ginger
An apple/ two
Approx. 5 celery stalks
Occasionally add carrots/ beets
The protein shake I am drinking is called Shakeology, I add almond milk, water and a handful of spinach to it and blend it up. The chocolate is the best flavor. I heard about Shakeology from Amanda Plazek. I highly recommend her youtube videos for those considering jaw surgery. Her posts gave me so much encouragement. Do a google search for “Amanda Plazek jaw surgery”.

Day 6: I saw the Doctor for the first time since the surgery. He removed the stitches from my jaw line so I no longer need to wear band aids which were irritating the sensitive skin on my face. I had X-rays and the Doc showed me the before and after. What a radical difference! You can see where my teeth are now meeting and I am very hopeful that I will be a lot more comfortable once my muscles settle down. I had my elastics changed allowing me to open my mouth for the first time in  days. I now remove the elastics when I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. Most importantly, I can now brush the backs of my teeth and inside of my mouth which was getting pretty furry. I can also stop drinking the disgusting medicines, truly, liquid tylenol with the added high fructose corn syrup is the most repulsive stuff in the world. I am taking all my meds in pill format. I am now on a soft food diet – whoop, whoop! I am looking forward to getting my strength and vitality back, although I wish I could keep the skinny body I have now… Ah well, you can’t have your cake and eat it too… About to put the oven on and make myself a baked sweet potato – I will just eat the inside – and a piece of salmon. A great day!

Day 7 & 8: Saw more improvement. I am eating more but still not sleeping so well and the constant jaw and body aching is starting to get to me. I am tired of sleeping with pillows under me, my neck keeps drooping over and I have back ache from not doing any exercises to stretch it out. Day 8 has been, by far, the grumpiest that I have been. I am less swollen but still super puffy. I still can’t smile. My husband was making me laugh and I thought I would split my top lip stitches. I also have such a runny nose and feel like I want to sneeze a lot. I was told in hospital by the Doctor that I have huge sinuses that were full of gunk that he irrigated out, so I guess that is why I have this stream out of my nose, and if it weren’t for the cold and flu tablets, it would be flowing down the back of my throat too. Charming, I know.

Day 9: I look amazing! (Ok, not Scarlett Johansen amazing) but the swelling is down a lot. I can half smile and when I do I can see my teeth for the first time. I also slept (woohoo!) waking only briefly to take some pain killers and use the bathroom at 2:25. I then went straight back to sleep and woke up at 6:35. Glorious, wonderful sleep! So, today I am in a marvelous mood. I have Kleenex permanently rolled into each sinus because of my runny nose but other than that…. I feel ready to be reintroduced to the world. Still have the back ache from sleeping so weird and no yoga stretches but I can deal. Eating like a champ. Had a scrambled egg, avocado and diced, canned tomato mush for breakfast. Scrumptious. Also, My teeth close over one another beautifully. When I open and close my mouth it is a symphony of teeth gently clicking together, and over one another. I can’t get enough of watching it. I still feel like I am moving my jaw around because it has become a habit to try and search out a comfortable position for my bite. I used to slide my bottom jaw forward so I could close my teeth together and I feel like I am still doing that. I have to get into the habit of not moving around looking for a comfortable landing but just going straight to what is natural, straight up and down, and now mechanically possible. Now I can’t wait to see what my face will look like without the swelling!Day 19: I got sidetracked and I didn’t post any updates like I should have, sorry! (I don’t know who I am saying sorry to because no one is reading this!) I went back to work today and it was like rush hour in traffic. By 11am I was exhausted and had to go home. I didn’t realize how little walking I had been doing and how much I usually do at work. I am still eating soft foods and am not able to chew for another 3 weeks until the bones have completely healed. If I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about and prepping food I get very frustrated, and hungry. Here are some meal ideas that have made me happy:
– Soups obviously, but throw in some quinoa or some rice to bulk it up
– Mushroom risotto with the mushrooms chopped really fine
– Ground lamb and sweet potato bake (a shepherd’s pie variation)
– Spinach and feta cheese dip, eaten with a spoon
– Ground turkey meatballs with heaps of marinara/ tomato “pasta” sauce topped with puff pastry and baked (it is a turkey meatball pot-pie and I got the recipe via Google)
– Salmon and cranberry sauce on mashed potato
– Beer battered fish and mashed potato
– Cauliflower mash instead of mashed potato, or with cheese sauce
– Welsh rarebit (look it up for some life-changing comfort food) on sourdough bread which is then, mushed.

The elastics I am wearing, go over three teeth on either side  on the top row, and over three teeth on the bottom row. They are pretty tight and felt super uncomfortable when I first had them put on. They are not too bad now. They are to train my muscles to sit in a normal bite position and not to shift around looking for a “good” position because that has been my habit for so long. I actually felt my jaw jerking strangely in muscle spasms before the elastics were so tight . Going to be so good to have less (no?) muscle spasms and to have a place of rest for my jaw!

I see the maxillofacial surgeon in a week to have the splint taken out and three days later I see the orthodontist to have a new splint put in, the hooks removed from the braces and new wires put on. They cut the top wire during the surgery and my top, middle teeth sit splayed out from one another. It is quite a scary smile I have but I am grateful I can smile again!

I am still using a nasal spray twice a day but I have stopped taking Day Quil. I felt like my stomach was suffering from taking it for too long. It hasn’t been too bad without it. Most of the mucus has subsided. I did sneeze today, which I am not supposed to do because it can burst your sinuses, but I opened my mouth wide so my nose didn’t take the pressure. I still take Tylenol daily but I am down to two tablets a day. The swelling is right down and no one can see swelling anymore except for me. I can also feel it when I pat the area on my cheeks around my nostrils; my face looks a lot rounder than it did before, and will do once all the swelling has subsided.

I am almost there!

…It has been 3 months since my last post. To give you an update: I still have a wire bridge between my molars in my palate and I still wear elastics to refine my bite but it is wonderful! 2 weeks after the surgery I went back to work and I was totally fine! At 6 weeks I was a bridesmaid in a wedding and doing hour+ walks on the beach. I looked good then too as most of the swelling had gone down. Eating was still burdensome but there is always something to eat on the menu. At 10 weeks I was doing 7 mile walks and 58 flights of stairs a day. I can safely say: if you have been told you need double jaw surgery and you are seriously considering it, then do it! It is worth it! My bite is so much better, correction, it is perfect. My face looks beautiful. I can’t help looking in the mirror and admiring my new jawline. It is weird because I still look like myself but so much better. I look prettier. There are no negative side effects at all. I still get some muscular tightness by the end of the day, especially if I go snorkeling and try keep a snorkel in my mouth over my braces for an hour, but I imagine even people with no TMJ might experience some tiredness in their jaw after that. On the whole, I have been truly amazed and blessed by these results.

One year after the surgery, and the day I got my braces taken off: