LOCKDOWN!

The crime: Fighting (however involuntarily) against recent jaw surgery, causing misaligned bite.

The punishment: At least one week of lockdown.


So, as you can see from the picture above, I'm definitely the Rubber Band Man, now. I took that on the drive home. Remember my concern about my open bite? I should have heeded it. Turns out that I've been "posturing" (an observation that might come as no surprise to some people). In this case, posturing means that while I've been pretty pleased with the results of my surgery, it turns out that my jaw muscles sort of liked things the way they were and have been secretly working against me and pulling my jaw out of shape. That's what left me with the open bite I began to notice a few days ago. I don't think any harm's been done, but I got a little bit of a scolding from the doctor for not coming up the minute I noticed something different.


All of this happened this afternoon at my first followup visit. Dr. Blakey comes strolling in (after I've been sufficiently aged in the waiting room and the dentist's chair you see me in above) and says, "What's going on here?"

"I was wondering the same thing," I said.

He immediately began moving my jaw around (only a minor ouch -- one benefit of being mostly numb) and slid it back where it's supposed to be. Then he grabbed one rubber band after another and began wrapping me shut.

At first, he wondered if maybe I had a screw loose (not an uncommon question about me), or, perhaps more accurately, whether one of the little screws holding my jaws together had broken?

He grilled me about what happened but I swore on everything I could mumble through the bands that I had no idea. That I noticed it around Day 5. "Should've come in then. The next time you notice your bite out of place, you get on the horn and get up here." I nodded like a 5-year-old.

After cooking my head with some X-rays, he and some of his residents huddled around to look at the results. They all looked fine. All the screws were in place. Dr. Blakey speculated that I might have even had my jaw out of socket.

"I know you don't want me to do this, but I'm going to have to lock you down," he said as more bands twanged their way onto the wires on my teeth. "OK. Can you open?"

I tried. "Mwo," I said.

"Good. We're going to need to keep you like that for at least a week."

He said it's possible (though not necessarily likely) that I might have to have another procedure to get plates put in my jaws to hold them in place. He said it's not nearly as serious a surgery as the MMA and GA I had. So, I guess that means it's not quite like being hit by a truck. He also said that about 1 in 15 people end up "fighting" against their change.

The good news is my bite is better and I seem to have more control over the drool. Unfortunately, I'm back to very liquid foods until I go for another visit next Thursday. Sigh.

Oh, well. We stopped by Trader Joe's in Cary on the way back. I stocked up on organic (of course!) chicken broth and assorted other liquid-like things. One thing I found out is that my weight is already down to 155. Yikes! I thought I'd been trying to pack it away. Now it's going to be even more difficult. Hmm. Beer has a lot of calories. ...