It’s been six days since the surgery, and I’m recovering well. My face is still swollen, but it has decreased considerably – I no longer look like I have a cantaloupe for a head. I look more like a chipmunk. The immense amount of pressure spreading from my cheeks, chin to lower ears that has plagued me for the past few days has also gone down. Now it’s more like an insistent pulsing. The biggest improvement, though, is finally being able to clean out my nose! They didn’t allow me to touch my nose so soon after the surgery and I’m still not allowed to sneeze/blow my nose, but I can finally use a Q-tip and, well, you know. Here’s to breathing!
I have however, developed a small complication that would be meaningless if it weren’t so annoying. I have a small throat infection that makes it feel as if I’m swallowing a golf ball, one made of sandpaper. Seeing as I’m on a liquid diet and swallowing is my main means of well, being alive, needless to say I’m cranky. No one can figure out what to give me for it, so all I can do is drink lots and lots of hot things and pray it goes away rather than getting worse.
Having this surgery has made me realize how much I miss my lips. It’s a silly thought, but come on. Now that they just sit there, useless and numb, I remember all those wonderful things I used to use them for. Like smiling, and sucking on a straw (hence the current syringe-feeding method), and forming consonants like ‘p’ and ‘b’. I miss ‘p’ and ‘b’, they were very satisfying, meaty sounds. Nowadays everything I manage to say has a wimpy ‘th’ in it.
The tentative date for getting my rubber bands on is this coming Monday. Thank God my mouth isn’t getting wired shut instead! The rubber bands do the job of the wiring without being, well, so permanent. I get to take them off if I need to do something important, like breathe because my nose is clogged. People with their mouths wired shut have to carry around wire cutters for those sort of emergencies. Wire cutters!
Anyway, the rubber bands will do the final job of guiding my jaw into its proper place, and keeping it there. Just because I got the surgery doesn’t mean the problem was immediately solved. My jaw has been (literally!) screwed back together and my bite has been corrected, but my jaw is just kind of hanging out where it wants while I heal right now. When I try to bring my teeth together I have to do lot of sliding adjustments, like sliding my lower jaw a little to the left or right or back or front, before my teeth click into place. Considering that’s really, really creepy, I can’t wait for rubber bands.
The last most amazing development in all of this: DAIRY! Do you know what ‘clear liquid diet’ means? It means can after can of chicken broth for lunch and dinner, perhaps some apple juice as a chaser. That is what I have been eating for the past six days. Blergh. But as of this coming Saturday morning, I can start adding dairy products to this unvaried diet. That means: protein shakes and ice cream shakes and milk shakes and smoothies and the crown jewel of hospital diets, Ensure! So much Ensure! I can hardly wait.
