Yesterday was my first day back at work! It went well, almost everybody said I looked exactly the same, except I'd lost some weight. This is great since this wasn't a cosmetic surgery, and that means that my swollen face is only noticeable to me and those who know me closely.
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| 5-week (left) vs 6-week (right) |
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| Week 6, still have the lopsided swelling, but most people don't notice. |
I also got the go-ahead from my surgeon to do weightlifting and rowing again, so now I have no excuses to slack off. I can also chew on whatever I feel comfortable with, which is still at the lasagna stage, as my teeth and jaws are sore from all the elastics.
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| Smile like you mean it |
I tend to eat ramen noodles a lot lately, using chicken bouillon to give some flavour to the soup. Mashed potato mixes are also great. I can eat most meats now, I just have to cut the pieces up a lot, and chewing gets tiring. Over the last 4 days, my face felt about the same, I've been eating more food outside with friends, getting more and more adventurous in my diet.
I finally decided to measure how far off my mid-lines were, and it looks like about 1.5mm.
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| ~1.5mm mid-line offset between front teeth of upper and lower. |
Hopefully this can be reduced with orthodontics. And even if not, as long as the teeth straighten up, it should hopefully still look fine in normal use. One heartening thing to note is from reading several other double jaw surgery post-op forum posters that have noticed mid-line offsets or cants. They tend to be extremely worried about how their mid-line was ruined, or their facial symmetry was ruined, yet when I look at most of their photos by and large they look completely fine to me. So this means I'm probably the only one that can notice these slight imperfections.
It's sometimes hard to reconcile my expectations with reality. I'd hoped subconsciously that for all the time and effort these braces and surgery take, that the final result would be a stepford perfect smile. In reality surgeons are human, and are working off of models provided by orthodontists, who are human as well, and the models and mechanics themselves have tolerances. The final result is that when they cut the jaw and try to make their positioning match the model, somewhere in the process of screwing everything in and fitting the teeth to the model, a little bit of error can creep in, and result in these slight mid-line offsets or cants of the jaw. The general goal of surgery isn't to go directly to the perfect bite, but get it in the center of normal range, so that orthodontics can then do the final tweaking on a much smaller scale of movement.
Perhaps it's like wood carving, using a large tool to take off large chunks in the beginning and get to the rough dimensions of the final product, and then using a fine tool to chisel all the features.
On to
Days 43-45
teeth look good 👍. What a difference!!!
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