Day 44

Okay. I'm a medical clusterfuck.

Remember my theory about the barometric pressure? Partially right but not in my case, it causes pain in some people but my pain was was being caused by something else. Today the pain came back with full force with some sexy swelling and I couldn't open my mouth even enough to fit a normal straw between my teeth. I emailed the surgeons office again and I was insistent that something was wrong.

Nothing about my recovery has been normal. Even in the hospital I told all the doctors that I was having trouble breathing and that was not normal, it was the allergic reaction. Kidney stones are not normal, and I definitely should have been checked out after that because throwing up can cause you to open your mouth wider than its ready to and my doctors should have been on that. Also, every other surgeon's instructions and every blog I have read says that you should be seeing you surgeon for check ups like every 3 weeks and mine hasn't seen me since he rolled me out of the operating room. He didn't even check on me when I was in the hospital he sent his team of annoying minion residents to do it for him.

I spent literally 4 or 5 hours emailing back and forth with my doctors telling them that something is not normal about this pain. Around two o'clock I was taking a warm compress off my face and felt a hard knot under my skin by my joint on the right side and there wasn't one on the other side, so I went to look in the mirror and noticed that my skin and even my ear looked like it was bruised a little bit, so I took a picture (which isn't helpful because the lighting is so bad) and sent it to the surgeons office who finally decided that I was right and told me to make an urgent appointment on Tuesday and in the meantime they started me on heavy duty antibiotics in case it is being caused by a site infection.I decided to come home...again (thank god my parents are in CT which is only two hours away by train) The antibiotics had some scary side effects listed on them like "nausea and diarrhea" and honestly if I'm going to be exploding from both ends I'd rather do it in the comfort of my own bathroom.

This new conflict has been very discouraging as I desperately just want to heal. But it has forced me to come to the conclusion that if this isn't an easily fixable issue, I need to seriously start considering that I might have to take a medical leave from school. I can't do this anymore, I have had maybe a total of 8 days where I have felt normal and healthy, and I can't keep coming home every weekend. But I have had one issue or another every week of this recovery and I am exhausted and I just can't do it anymore.

My lesson for all you potential jaw surgery friends is: you need to advocate for yourself, if you feel like something isn't right, get it checked out. You know your body and your surgeon has probably never had to recover from this surgery so they don't know from personal experience what to expect. So don't be afraid to be a pain in their asses.