Blog Spring Cleaning! Administration Updates!

Hey everyone, just wanted to write a quick post updating some people on some of the changes to the blog. Since my big surgery is (finally) behind me, I've gone and done some "spring cleaning" so to speak on certain pages.  I've simplified some pages and added to others. Please check them out!

Changes to note:

1. I've created a pre-surgical grocery shopping check list. I like lists and find them helpful. Go to the shopping tab above and click the link to be directed to the printable check list. 
2. I've updated my about me page to include recent surgical milestones and upcoming appointments.
3. I've added my ENT specialist to the provider contact list I have above. 

Works in progress:
I realized that I never finished (or forgot to update) the Questions and Answers page. I will reorganize and finish that in the next couple days.

Look for a real jaw update after Friday afternoon. Next braces appointment is Friday, March 19th! I might get a date for when the braces are removed which would be extremely exciting!

An update! And some grumbling...

Yesterday was my 7 week check up with Dr. Keith. It doesn't feel like 7 weeks have past by! Everything seemed to just happen with lightning speed. My original back to work date is coming up on Monday which is exciting. I've already been back to work for 3 weeks so it'll be nice to really get back into the groove of things.

As I said, yesterday was the 7 week check up which went very well. Everyone at the office knows who I am so when they see me they always ask me how i'm doing and tell me how great I look. Dr. Keith had a resident with him when he saw me and he was taking notes so I'm assuming he's newly out of school or doing a rotation in maxillofacial surgery. He was very quiet. They asked me to take out my elastics since they wanted to accurately measure my open bite range. Dr. Keith and the resident were very impressed with how fast I took the elastics out! He said that it's amazing how good some people get at it so I must be one of those people.

We chatted for a few minutes, nothing crazy. I wasn't in too much pain, just generally sore. These elastics make me sore more often than not. It's nothing that tylenol or advil won't cure. It usually happens after eating. Dr. Keith recommended heat, he said it would soothe the joint area and help to promote healing. He gave me the go ahead to eat normally again, which means that I can officially come off a soft food diet! Yay! VERY exciting! I'm not sure if my jaw could handle really hard food just yet but he said the more I use it, the easier it'll become. Since I'll be eating harder foods, I'm going to start using the heat after meals. He didn't want to recommend heat until now because my swelling is finally starting to settle down. I can also use a straw again full time and was completely taken off of nasal precautions. WAHOO.

However, I did get a small amount of bad news. I complained to Dr. Keith about my right nostril. It's difficult to blow my nose on that side and I still have a hard time breathing fully through that side. It's also sensitive enough that it's started to bother me a bit. I showed Dr. Keith and he said that the right nostril opening is smaller than the left side. He said that it looks like the cartilage must have slipped either during surgery or sometime after. Either way, he said that it would need to be addressed. There is a chance that I may need to have another surgery in order to fix this issue. (-_-) To be honest, it made me extremely depressed. Here I am thinking that I'm completely finished with this whole surgery business and then he tells me that I'm maybe/probably going to need another one to fix this new issue. Luckily, since it happened because of the last surgery, it would be covered as a continuation of care. And the recovery time this time around is a lot shorter, around 1 week. And it would be a quick day surgery procedure. I still have a small amount of swelling on my right side so he wants to wait until that goes away before he makes any recommendations. I just hope I don't get sick or anything cause that would make this whole nose breathing thing even worse, hahaha.

Since I'm finished with the oral portion of my surgery, I've updated the tabs at the top to include before and after photos. I received my before photos from Dr. Keith yesterday and was able to easily upload them here for people to view. I haven't taken any professional after photos yet because Dr. Klein is waiting to take those for when I am closer to finishing. I will post them as soon as I receive them. Feel free to check out the before and after tab above. There are x-ray images up there so please check them out if you are interested.

Super long post - sorry in advance!

Here's another update and some good news! I didn't turn into jaws at this appointment!!! While I'm ready to be done with everything and be surgically-ready, not sure I was ready to have an orthognathic wire installed at my last appointment. My most recent appointment was Friday April 24th. I had an afternoon appointment which was very different for me. Usually with my schedule, morning appointments work best. However, this time, it just worked out that an afternoon appointment was best. A lot happened at this appointment so I'm sorry if this post is a tad longer than normal.

Dr Klein and I spoke and she looked at my teeth quite closely at this visit. She kept tilting my face and I constantly had to smile, open, bite down, smile again and then open again. Haha! One of my teeth was remodeled as a kid and I think it's proving to be a little difficult. I swam into a pool ladder and chipped my front tooth when I was 9 years old. It was fixed before my teeth were straight so they fixed it to match my teeth esthetically. Now that my teeth are straight and where they should be, this one tooth is a little larger than the other one. I will probably need to get it remodeled at some point but it doesn't really bother me that much. She said that she is now getting down to fine-tuning my teeth which is good because it means they are almost good to go!
 Dr Klein is so funny, she asked if I minded if she went a little OCD on my teeth. LOL. She wanted to re-position the brackets to fine tune the teeth to make them absolutely perfect. Moving the brackets would make my appointment run a tad longer (since it originally wasn't booked for a bracket re-positioning) so I'm glad she thought to ask. I think the brackets being moved maybe might have saved me from getting my "jaws" installed, so thanks for that! I'm hoping that I can put off getting that wire installed until the very last second. The other nice thing about getting the brackets moved is that they scale back on the wire for the next 4-6 weeks. The teeth can only take so much so they don't want to stress them out too much. So I went with a different wire and I have regular O-Rings instead of the viscous A-Chain. My teeth weren't nearly as sore as they have been recently. I thought I was going to be much more tender the next day but it wasn't too bad at all!

I was a little sore before I even arrived at the office though. Last Saturday, a bunch of our friends invited us to play beach volleyball with them. We had such a blast playing and it really made me remember how much I liked playing volleyball. I'd love to play in an local league or something but not sure it'll work out with my schedule and Don's schedule. However, halfway through our second game my husband punched the ball right into my throat/jaw on my right side. It definitely stunned me and he felt super bad. It didn't hurt at first but slowly started to get sore and very stiff. I think Dr Klein could tell that something was up with my jaw but jaw pain is not her expertise. She told me to call Dr Keith (the oral surgeon) which got me a little bummed. Something like this could derail my progress and slow everything down. She told me to call right away but I woke up on Saturday with less pain so I think I just need some time. If the stiffness/soreness gets worse, I'll definitely call Dr. Keith but I'm sure he'll just tell me to rest up and take it easy which is what I'm doing.

Right before my appointment was over, Dr Klein told me that she has a patient who reads my blog! Wow! I mean, I know that other people besides friends and family read this but it's really crazy to hear it from my orthodontist. Due to HIPPA, she couldn't give him out my information however, he gave her his card and told me that I could take his information and do what I wanted with it. I was so amazed that I couldn't NOT email him so I did that over the weekend. Getting the card made me wonder though, I thought I had set up a way to contact me through the blog. When I got home I took a look at my blog settings and realized that the layout and theme I had chosen when I updated the blog, were not compatible with all the added stuff I had chosen! So I had to redo the theme and layout AGAIN. So I'm sure you noticed that the layout and theme have changed yet again. But now all the stuff works like I want it to!
If anyone needs to contact me in any way, please use the contact form to the right! It works, I swear (i tested it to make double sure!) and all messages get forwarded to my own personal email.

 Now onto some fun stuff, aka progress photos.

I snapped a quick selfie after my brackets were removed but before the new ones were replaced. It gave me a good sense of what my teeth will look like once they are off forever.

These are my models! The yellow ones are the most recent and the white ones are the very first models I took back in 2014. You can really see how different my teeth and jaws are now. The bottom models are my top teeth jaws and the top models are my bottom teeth jaws.

Really crappy morning teeth selfie. 

My next appointment is in May to have (you guessed it) more impressions done. Hahaha. I don't need to see Dr. Klein at this appointment though. I'll see her again the first week in June for another adjustment. So 2 upcoming appointments!