All Liquid Diets

So my surgery was 12 days ago. Post op tomorrow morning. Swelling's almost entirely gone. There's a splint on the roof of my mouth that's driving me CRAZY. Starting a few days after I got home from the hospital it started scraping up my tongue something fierce. It was awful. Now it's just a way of reminding me that it'll be another two weeks before I can start cheating on my all liquid diet the way I want to.

See, this this is like a retainer in the sense that it's a hunk of plastic molded to fit my teeth and palate. It covers the roof of my mouth and then wraps around my teeth and hooks onto my braces. I have no idea exactly how it's staying in because, of course, I was unconscious when they put it in, but I know I can't remove it. And since when I say wrapping I mean it covers my teeth, eating is a no go. I mean, I'm not supposed to anyway, but if I tried it wouldn't work.

And I have elastics hooking my upper and lower braces together. Unfortunately, this means my all liquid thing does not include ice cream. Or mashed potatoes, which is what I lived on last time I was on an all liquid diet....

I'm praying that tomorrow my lovely surgeon will tell me that I can stop wearing the elastics and can start using straws again. That will make my life 84423897483275x easier. Exactly that many times easier, in fact. Really.

Anyhoo, so here's my thing on this all liquid crap:

Ensure leaves an icky residue in your mouth. When you have elastics 24/7, that means your mouth is seriously gross. This is why I've told my parents I will not be drinking the Ensure, no matter how much ice cream it is blended with, until I've been given leave to remove my elastics more often. It's just too gross.

Also, my mother has been at knitting camp for the last week. That's basically a conference for knitters. Anyway, apparently one of the camper's kids had this same surgery and whatever the camper made for the family she through in the blender for the kid. Which is specifically what I told my mother years ago I would refuse to do right now.

If you ask me, that is the most inconsiderate thing you can do for someone who is recovering from surgery (well, aside from saying things about their swelling...).

Here's the thing: I am 19 years old. It is summer vacation. When you think of college freshmen on summer vacation, you think of all kinds of excitement and fun things. But instead, I am recuperating. I am going to bed early. I am taking lots of naps. I am not driving. In other words, I am missing out on an awful lot right now. Seriously, you know where I was last Thursday night while practically EVERYONE I KNOW (including my boyfriend and THIRTEEN YEAR OLD BROTHER) was at the Harry Potter midnight showing? Asleep. I didn't get to go. I cannot tell you how crappy that was.

I'm missing out on so much crap and I can't eat ANYTHING I want. And people want me to eat whatever they're eating, in mush form. A) that's disgusting. B) that's not fair. If I'm missing out on everything else in the world, it's not fair to ask me to eat something that doesn't actually resemble anything edible.

That said, I've lost 14lbs so far. 'Course, my diet may change dramatically tomorrow since stopping wearing the elastics will greatly alter what I'm willing/able to consume.

Who knew you could lose weight on Pepsi and egg drop soup?

PS It's totally possible to slurp whipped cream off the top of a milkshake.

Two months from today

This is another post about teeth and surgery. I'm going to be explaining exactly what my surgeon will do, so if you're squeamish, skip it.

I can't sleep, which means I still think it's Sunday, May 8th (Happy Mother's Day!). So I'm thinking about what I'm going to be doing two months from today, on July 8th.

I'm going to be going to the hospital where my wonderful surgeon is going to make my orthodontist like my teeth for the first time in my life.

You know what I said when I met my surgeon the first time? I think I was in middle school and the surgeon asked me if I knew why I was there. I very cleverly told him, "Dr. H doesn't like my teeth."

I previously explained that I have an under bite where basically the space my lower teeth wrap around is bigger than my upper teeth (like, my teeth are in concentric bite shaped circles...). Like I said, originally it wasn't so obvious from the front, it was more like my lower jaw was just wider, but with my braces they pulled my lower teeth forward, so it's under bite all the way around.

So my surgery is in two months.

I've gone back and forth about a gajillion times whether I want to be wired shut for six weeks or have plates and screws. There's a tiny risk of nerve damage with the latter, and no risk of nerve damage for the former. With the latter, I'll know as soon as I wake up from the anesthesia whether the surgery was successful. With the former, I won't know till they unwire me.

But that's not what I'm using to make this decision.

The last time I saw the surgeon, he reminded me and my parents of our choices. As we were leaving the hospital, we were discussing it. My parents both agreed that they wouldn't be able to deal with being wired shut for six weeks, they'd feel claustrophobic in their own heads.

Suddenly, two thoughts came to my mind.

Thought #1: I love to ski. I haven't actually skied since 8th grade because I got busy in high school, but I was really good in middle school. At one point in maybe 6th grade, I decided to try snow boarding.

It completely freaked me out. I had both feet attached to the same thing. I couldn't handle it.

In the car, I suddenly realized it might be like that, only my head instead of my feet. My head's a lot more important than my feet. It'd be talking instead of walking that I wouldn't be able to do properly. Not a pleasant thought.

Thought #2: At some point when I was little, I would imagine anywhere between ages 5 and 8, my father read The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask to us. After this, we rented the movies. I don't remember anything about The Three Musketeers movie, which makes me think I might be imagining having rented it, but I do remember some scenes from The Man in the Iron Mask very very vividly.

Mainly, I remember the last scene. The king, who turned out to actually be the younger twin and therefore not the legitimate king, has been put in the iron mask he previously made his brother wear because he is evil and knew his brother had the more legitimate claim and was afraid someone would find out. You just see him thrashing around this room that he's clearly locked into. There's been this decree that no one is to speak to him or be spoken to by him or anything for the rest of his life and he gets his food through a little cat flap on the door and he has this iron thing on his head. It looks like a knight's helmet.

Except he can't take it off. He's completely trapped inside it and when you throw in that he's trapped in this room completely alone until he dies with no human contact whatsoever, you have to imagine that he's going to wind up trapped inside his head and going crazy.

I don't know why I watched this movie when I was little. My parents were pretty good about making sure the things we watched were age appropriate, and to be fair, it's not like this movie ever gave me nightmares.

But I think that's because it never occurred to me that there could be any kind of equivalent in my own life.

Driving out of that parking garage listening to my parents talk about being claustrophobic in their own heads, I realized I would feel like I was reenacting that last scene for the whole 6 weeks.

Hell no, I thought to myself. I'm getting plates and screws.

So, with the method decided on, the next step is the actually surgery.

This is the part you don't want to read if you're squeamish about surgery.

Basically, the goal is to widen my upper jaw and bring my lower jaw back and to the side slightly (because as if my face isn't screwed up enough, it's crooked... I'm kidding. From the outside, my face is fine. Although I can tell my lower jaw is crooked, and I can see how it's made the rest of my face slightly crooked. Moving on.).

To do this, they're basically going to slit my upper palette and put in a permanent palette expander. BTW no matter what I had decided about plates and screws or wires, I would have wound up with plates and screws on the top.

Then they're going to cut into my lower jaw. I'm not exactly sure where. I know one of the cuts is going to go through the very back lower right of my mouth because that's where the wisdom tooth they had to take out for the surgery was. Other than that, I just know they're gonna cut into my bones and pull my jaw back and to the side.

Then they put a bunch of metal in and screw it all together.

And voilá. Perfect teeth.

Then I spend two nights or so in the hospital. Which honestly is making me somewhat nervous.

I've never spent a single night in the hospital. When I got my wisdom teeth out is the first time I've gone to a hospital for something more than a consult or getting blood work done, unless you count when I was born, which I don't.

And of course, I'm 19 which means I'm not a kid. Maybe it sounds childish, but I'm praying they'll let me have my parents there when they knock me out and wake me up. I mean, they're doing stuff with my mouth and teeth and jaw. Considering my extreme lack of hospital experience, I think I deserve my parents there....

PS I'm just gonna point out that I have an older sister who broke her leg at 18 months, and two brothers who have each gotten stitches and various other bloody things that got taken care of in the emergency room.

They all had parents around for their hospital treatment!! Well, except for the times when they were staying with friends or on biking trips or whatever. But they still had someone with them for all this stuff....