Sam's Double Jaw Surgery

We arrived at the hospital 2 hours before 9:30 am as they requested, it's about 8:46 am now, I've changed into a medical gown, wearing a hairnet and chilling in this bed with this nice warm blanket. The beds are motorized, tiny nurses can easily move around giants like me, I'm in the future! I'll have to put my phone away soon, I'll be getting an IV placed soon, and they say I should be able to see my parents a little bit before surgery, and then see my surgeon and all the other folks to go with. Should be exciting! I'll update this at some point after with more photos. I described the procedure I'll be having in yesterday's post . It'll be a double jaw surgery, moving the lower backward and the upper forward. (Update 9:30am) IV is in, had to take some nasal spray that was salty on the throat. Valium will be coming in so I should be feeling it soon. Getting the IV in My parents took this of me while I napped. (Update 11:13am) a...

Staying at a hotel for the next couple days, since my home apartment is on the 4th floor with no elevator, which my parents think is probably too much exertion for the first night back.

I have a pronounced under-bite, meaning my lower jaw is further forward than my upper jaw. The medical terminology is a class III malocclusion . In my case, my upper jaw is slightly recessed by 1 mm, and my lower jaw is jutting forward by 6 mm (from the average human). This comes out to a distance of 7mm between the lower and upper teeth. My upper jaw is also canted (rotated) down to the left by 1mm. To correct this I will be getting orthognathic (fancy word for jaw-face-bone) surgery, where they'll cut both the maxilla (upper jaw) and mandible (lower jaw) and reposition the upper slightly forwards and the lower slightly more backwards. Putting these words together my surgery is a bilateral maxillar osteotomy and mandibular osteotomy. Somewhere in history, a surgeon was like, let's just break the face and see what happens. They're doing a Lefort I osteostomy (fancy word for cutting bones) for the maxilla (upper jaw). I'm the lower one called a Le Fort 1,...

Yesterday and today I've tried to eat everything I thought I'd miss. It's a bit cliche at this point having read all the other jaw surgery blogs but yes, it was my last supper also. Several friends came over with a list of all the favourite foods people with jaws like to eat, and it turns out it's mostly carbs. We had lots of pizza, donuts, popcorn, french bread and cheese, and mini quiches. Bob's Donuts. Never forget. Today my parents arrived, my mum in particular had brought enough icepacks to keep a small platoon of penguins comfortable on an extended expedition away from Antarctica. She also brought several varieties of sippy-cups, which I'm looking forward to testing in battle. Borrowing my gf's blender, which will be my new best friend soon. My dad told me to take it easy these days before surgery, so today became a lazy netflix and chill day (Children of Men, amazing movie ), with bouts of gorging myself at restaurants with the family. Han...

Why wait for surgery to wire your jaws shut? Every little sniffle or cough makes me freeze and worry if I've caught a cold. I don't think I have one, but I guess we'll know soon enough. On an unrelated note, since I've got these surgical hooks in my girlfriend had an experiment for me: A test run at drinking a fruit smoothie with teeth wired shut using floss. Turns out floss works really well as a wire, I couldn't open my jaw at all. It was extremely unnerving. After a minute I got used to the sensation, though it was strange leaving my jaw muscles slack and not having my jaw fall. All-the-fruits smoothie At some point my brain decided to call the strange sensations pain, and we used scissors to cut the floss wire open. Right now because there's an under-bite, I had a big gap between the teeth which made it easy to drink the smoothie from, so the experiment may have had false premises. Next is  T minus 2 days Previous was  T minus 4 days

I thought I'd gotten away with keeping my wisdom teeth. Most of my friends had had theirs removed at younger ages, but the dentists had always told me that it looked like I was using them, so it was fine. The orthodontist said it was not fine. Damn. After some severe regret about the times I secretly thought my wisdom teeth were better than other people's, I was referred to an oral surgeon to have the wisdom teeth taken out. Both of my lowers were nice and erupted, but my upper right was slightly impacted. However, they happily told me I had a gigantic mouth which would make the operation much easier. I wasn't sure how I felt about that but I took it as a win, and with the upcoming jaw surgery, boy am I glad I have a giant mouth. My girlfriend was there to get me back home while I was loopy on hydrocodone. She seemed to be enjoying how loopy I was.  The surgeon had also said I had really strong bones, so that was a nice ego boost, right until he said it'd mak...

It's Thursday, second last day at work. Operation D-Day is on Tuesday. Not much has changed since yesterday , so I guess I'll talk about how my teeth were before braces. They looked like this at the bright bushy-eyed age of 26. Sam and his gorgeous pre-braces/surgery teeth Pretty awesome right? I hadn't ever thought about it back then. However, after some heavy introspection, getting an actual job, and several dentists over the years giving me cheeky looks and the whole " Hey I love your teeth, have you considered braces? " I decided to find an orthodontist. In not so many words, yeah I needed braces, he said (one could argue orthodontists are biased towards braces, but this was a gimme). Not just braces though, the wisdom teeth needed to go, and oh yeah; Jaw Surgery, Double Jaw Surgery. Unfortunately all the specialists agreed, but my dentist didn't, and man was it a stressor having a dentist telling me I don't need surgery. Who to believe? Wh...

Today as I was getting my surgical hooks crimped onto my brace wires, I started to really feel the weight of this upcoming surgery (Next week!) . So hey, might as well start the blog now! I am Sam - Before Surgery In the weeks running up to my surgery I read several blogs that have comforted me, terrified me, and maybe given me an idea of what's about to come. I'm going to try and do the same, and hopefully it'll help at least one person out there. I had my my pre-op phone call yesterday with the anesthesiology department. It was a short and sweet 15 minute call. They basically made sure I wouldn't die on their operating table. They were happy to hear I exercise semi-regularly, don't drink excessively or smoke, and that my medical history is reasonably safe. And luckily, I've had my tonsils out in the past, so the good news there is I don't seem to have issues being put under. Hopefully nothing has changed, since that happened a loooong time ago in...