Yeah I have a chin!
Here I am after one week. i am still very swollen along my jaw line and under my chin especially. If you enlarge the frontal view you can see yellow bruising under my chin and down my neck. I am able to move my lower lip a little more. Still have a lisp when I talk though. I have stopped taking pain pills and I feel MUCH better. Can't wait until the swelling is all gone!
So here I am at day 1 after the surgery. Obviously looking a little swollen. This is what I call my "Jay Leno face".Nick has been a great. He blends my food, wipes my mouth and keeps me “laughing”, more like a gurgling sound at this point. I have rubber bands on my teeth now (and they will remain there for ~8 weeks so that my jaw doesn’t relapse), but I can mumble fairly audibly and Nick is very patient. He is also doing a great job as my personal photographer, so that I have lots of pictures to post on this blog.
No feeling in my chin yet, but my lower lip hurts so I'm thinking that's a good sign.
flattering). So far have been pleased w/ the hospital food, had some great smashed pears and malt-o-meal.
Just a bit about the surgery. Here is a tracing of an individual with class 2 malocclusion. My personal tracing would be similar, except that I am not having surgery involving the maxilla. You can see how retruded the mandible is compared to the rest of the facial skeleton.
The BSSO involves sectioning the mandible and sliding it forward, careful not to damage the Inf. alveolar nerve (resulting in parasthesia to the lower lip and tongue- meaning you would loose feeling to those areas supplied by the nerve).
And now for the second arch. I was so excited to get my bottom arch banded, every step closer to being ready for surgery was beyond exciting.
After about a million preliminary appointments we finally got brackets placed (February 2007). As my maxillary teeth had shifted the most, and would take the longest to move, we started there first. This picture was taken about a month after placement. As you can tell, my teeth are almost aligned already. I was a little afraid at how quickly they moved, since moving teeth too fast can cause root resorption. (however, radiographs taken since, don't show any sign of it, phew). At this point, my maxillary arch was about the same size as my mandibular arch, so my teeth were occluding all wrong. A quad helix was placed on my palate to widen the arch. A word on the quad helix. It wasn't necessarily painful, but made eating a nightmare. Anything I bit into got wrapped around it, especially fruit. Also, I could never get used to talking with it and always sounded like my mouth was full of food. Above and beyond however was the experience of flossing with all that metal in my mouth. Weaving the floss through my arch wire and then through the quad arms was impossible. On average I think it took about 10 minutes just to floss my maxillary teeth. Needless to say I didn't floss everyday, if it weren't for Superfloss, it probably would have never happened.
Here's a look from the "side". You can see that my anterior teeth flare out towards my lip, and my laterals have moved back. It's not really a great look at my profile (as I am good at avoiding profile shots), but you can tell that my chin is set back quite a ways.
