To start off, this story is for all those people out there that have a major surgery coming up. Plastic surgery, dental surgery, maybe your child or parent or friend is getting a surgery that you know will forever change their lives. Here I tell my story of what it was like, including all the details, to have a life changing surgery. To have been wired shut.
I was seven years old and my mouth was known as an ” orthodontist’s nightmare.” I had my mother’s small mouth and my dad’s enormous teeth, which led to horrendous crowding. I started orthodontics right aware but on day one the doc told my parents that if I was ever going to have straight teeth, I would need jaw surgery.
Dad, being the tactful person he is, told me this fact on my 13th birthday. Needless to say, I was none too happy. I was scared. By that point I had already seen some of my friends get their braces off, while I on the other hand had a palette expander and on my second set of braces. Oh yeah, and my wisdom teeth had already been removed. They were just little nubs in my gums, just beginning to form, and I was sent to dreamland while they removed them. So to be told that the biggest challenge was yet to come, and several years away? ACK!
Three years later, August 14th, the day of surgery came. I had already given 2 bags of blood in preparation. Actually, I fainted in the elevator after I gave the first bag because I REALLY did not want to miss a Red Sox game on TV. Oops. I had been taking iron supplements for weeks. It was early morning and I was a nervous wreck.
First they put local anesthesia patches on both my hands so they could insert the IV. They told me the IV would me in my left hand so I could write with my right once I couldn’t talk. Unfortunately, my stars weren’t lined up that morning when I got ” Mr Shaky Hands” as he has become known at home, who ended up sticking the needle right through my vein in my left hand. Which meant I would get a very nasty bruise on my left hand and the IV ended up in my right hand. Great start.
Hours later I slowly woke up. I have a tube in each nostril. I’m really drowsy. However, no pain. Once I get to my room, my mom gives me my little white board we had bought earlier and a dry-erase pen so I could communicate. However, now my right hand is in a small cast so I don’t accidentally yank the IV out, which makes writing that much harder.
My best friend comes to visit me and as soon as she walks into the room she starts to bawl. Great. Clearly I must look like something that crawled from a sewer. After she left, My mom helped me into the bathroom, where really I got the first glimpse of myself in the mirror. Most of my head was wrapped in a white cloth. My entire face was swollen. My lip was split in about 3 places, so swollen that it touched my chin. I could see that there was this plastic wafer thing in my mouth, which was held in place with strong elastics to my braces. I started crying. I couldn’t talk.
The amount of drugs I was on was ridiculous. I was on Tylenol with Codeine, a pain killer stronger than morphine, a steroid ( to keep the swelling down), and a mouthwash ( since I can’t brush my teeth. Yes, ew) which just so happens to turn your teeth black as a side effect. I was a good looking girl. I tried to drink however I had a hard time getting anything down. All of it was pure liquid but I still had difficulty swallowing.
Now one of the scariest things about jaw surgery is they give you this pair of clippers to carry with you at all times. The point being that if you ever got in an accident or something and EMTs needed to get access to your mouth, you would have the tool to do it. Of course you would have to repeat the whole surgery if they did cut the wire or elastics. Also you need to cut if you got sick. As in vomit. One can die choking on vomit so this is also another reason to carry the clippers. I got a very good scare from that method. They removed the tubes from my nose ( One to my stomach to pump out old blood and the other to help me breathe). Unfortunately I did end up getting sick. I was unbelievably scared that they would have to cut me open not even 24 hours after going through that whole ordeal. I was blessed to have a wonderful nurse there that night who calmed me down, noting I hadn’t eaten anything solid in over a day, so I was safe. It’s still a very scary feeling though.
I didn’t sleep for four days, due to the steroids. Eventually they had to take me off way earlier than intended because, according to my mother, I wanted to fly and had uncontrollable full body shakes. And the late night T.V. sucked too, so I was happy to finally get some rest.
One of the best tools I was given though was a pump with a suction tip. Now this may sound silly, but you have no idea how much one drools when you can’t control your lips. This little puppy was a god send. Helped me clear things up and breathe. I don’t know what I would have done without it.
For two weeks I lived on the couch watching TV, eating Burger King frappes every day for lunch and dinner, with my pump on one side and the clicked on the other. Not once did I ever feel any pain. However I cried at lot. You don’t’ realize how many food commercials there are until you can’t eat any of it.
Eventually all the swelling went down, the plastic bite plate was removed, the drugs stopped, and three days before my senior pictures, my braces were removed. I look at those pictures and compare them to the girl before the surgery and I don’t even recognize her. I look like a different person. A better person. A person who actually can bite into an apple for the first time in her life.
So what did I actually have done to me? Both jaws were broken, with the lower one brought forward. I had no chin, so they sliced my existing chin, bringing it forward and placing 6 screws there. I also had a deviated septum ( that thing that divides your nostrils? mine was crooked, making it hard to breathe) so they fixed that since they were there anyway.
No scars. Nothing to show the fact that I actually had this surgery. The only proof? Looking at an X-Ray showing 10 screws in my face.
And do i regret having this horrifying experience happen to me at such a young age? Not one bit. If I had to do it all over again, I would do it in a heartbeat.
So for those of you thinking about that life changing surgery, I say go for it. You only have one life to live. The immediate may be rough, but the longterm will be fabulous.
