Playing the Cards Dealt

I consider myself a bit of a card player, so that's exactly what I did last weekend, the final weekend before my 11/1 main event jaw surgery. I got together with some of my local and visiting friends on Saturday night to eat some steak at an Argentine steak house, a nourishing meal considering the fact that as of 11/1 both my social outings and my solid meal outings would cease to exist until roughly Christmas time. The real kicker, and further evidence of my card-playing skills and eccentricity, was getting this group of Manhattanites together to actually leave the island and hit up Little Columbia over in Queens for a night of salsa/Latina dancing at a place I visited a few weeks back. The steak dinner was totally a kicker. It was the Saturday before Halloween, so naturally everyone was going to Halloween parties while we ate steak at an Argentine restaurant? Well, it was actually quite appropriate because the ambiance of the place was totally Adams-Family with long, wooden tables and multi-tiered melting candles and a farm-house feeling. Way cool.

The Columbian nightclub? Not cool at all. It was an older, mainly male crowd, so the only Latina for me to dance with was my friend Melissa. Not to mention that no one else that came that night knew how to Salsa! Naturally, the Columbians were circling our table trying to get dances with the plethora of single girls :). We did find it interesting that sometime around midnight, a guy who had clearly spent hours in the bathroom doing his hair, cleared the dance floor and began karaoke singing classic Spanish songs. It was the most hilarious thing I've ever seen. This, in fact, must be a Columbian thing because people were cheering him on and this had happened before, as well. It was a terrible event, in any case, but at least we've got some stories out of it.

Now, the jaw surgery. Basically, my understanding was that there was going to be three procedures done on my jaw: 1.) a cutting of my upper jaw to pull it back, 2.) a cutting of my lower jaw to pull it forward, 3.) An extension of my chin so that my lips would naturally close and cover my teeth. Last week, in my final meeting with the surgeon, he mentioned that his resident and him would meet later that night to discuss my procedure and there was a chance that, because of the nature of my jaws and the way the lower jaw works, there might not be any cuts necessary to the back of my lower jaw. Before the surgery, I found out that they weren't sure if it was going to work because of the in-exactness of the models they were working with, so they would make that decision during the procedure.

So I arrive at 7:00am on 11/1 to check in with my mom. I am quickly and efficiently taken through check-in and meeting with the nurse to take my blood, change my clothes, discover my medical history etc. At around 9:00am, when the four-hour procedure is scheduled to begin, I meet with the surgeon as I lay on a gurney outside the operating room and begin to feel the nerves. The way I mentally built myself up for the event, like most events, was by convincing myself that the worst case scenario was going to happen, that my social life would cease to exist, that I wouldn't be able to talk for the rest of the year, and that I would have a complex over the fact that medical insurance typically considers the chin-extension "cosmetic", essentially a chin-job. Add to that the fact that they were having trouble getting a massive IV into my arm before I went in, and we've got a full-house. So naturally, there were nerves.

After they whisk me into the room, I make a joke to the plethora of residents surrounding me about wanting to get to the main event. The oxygen mask goes on, and the next thing I know I'm being woken up in the recovery room. Through the haze, my mom appears but I'm in and out of memory at this point. All I know is that I'm whisked through the halls of the hospital and eventually end up in a room near the nurses station. There were apparently discussions going on about whether they would let my mom stay with me that night and also considering the fact that I there is a possibility of vomit as a result of the anesthesia and with rubber bands holding my jaws together, that wasn't a good thing.

[Parental Advisory: gross details below. Not for the wary]
But we ended up getting a private, solo room. All I knew at this point was that I could hardly breathe and I needed some pain killers. The pain wasn't excruciating, but I felt the dull pain throughout my head and needed something. Also, there was a large amount of phlegm in my throat, so thick and voluminous that I was having difficulty breathing. Thankfully, there was a suction pipe in my room and for the rest of the night my mom put that thing down my throat whenever I called her or starting coughing and it would suck out all of the phlegm - and blood (runoff from the tubes that went up my nose, I'm guessing). According to my mom, the first time the nurse sucked the stuff out of my throat, about 1/4 cup of disgusting junk came out. It was like this for most of the night until they started feeding me sudafed in addition to me sleeping on my side. I also was hooked up to morphine, antibiotics, and fluids that caused me to wake up every half-hour and pee a huge amount. If my Montezuma's Revenge / parasite wasn't dead before surgery, I don't see how it could have survived it after! I also laid with ice packs that were re-filled by the excellent nurse staff every half hour or so. To be honest, I didn't sleep a whole lot last night. Possibly because of the nurses who kept coming in to test my vitals, possibly because of the ice pack refilling or urinating, or possibly because I'd slept the whole day under anesthesia!

In the end, today arrived and I'm doing great. I can't talk because they put some sort of implant behind my front upper teeth where my lower teeth glide into. This is a result of the fact that they didn't have to cut my lower jaw. They found that by moving my upper jaw up (i.e. shaving or cutting bone out), my lower jaw would extend further up and back, lining up perfectly with my upper jaw. Now, my lower jaw teeth will spend the next week gliding into this device, more or less training my lower jaw to extend further than it did before. They also extended my chin "as far as it would go", which was about 8mm or 1/2 inch. It is in fact a very minor change, but we'll see how everything looks afterwards.

My surgeon, as always, impressed me with his positiveness when he visited me this morning and had only encouraging things to say. In all honesty, this surgery has been less (or, rather, the same) painful as the first one, despite the use of two metal plates, eight metal screws, and one "emergency screw" (yikes). My lips are quite beat-up, but otherwise the swelling is not too bad so far, I've been on simple ibuprofen since getting cut off of the morphine, and am in good spirits. The rubber bands are similar to rubber bands that many people with braces have - flexible and extendable, allowing me to open my mouth. It will be much better when the tooth-slide implant is removed and I can eat pureed foods. Currently, the buck stops at the implant and I can't get food past that without using a straw, which limits me to liquids only for the time being.

J. Riley, pictures of my face will be posted tomorrow. But here's one taken by my mobile phone of the view outside our hospital window. Central Park in the fall from the 8th floor ICU room: