Day 40: Midlife Crisis

  • Pain: 0/10
  • Inconvenience: 3/10

Hands up, sheriff.

Today was, once again, shaving day. It felt even more unsettling than usual because of the spiral of confusion my little nerves are in right now. I don’t know if they’re going through a midlife crisis, or if they’re angry at me, or if they just went through a difficult breakup, or what their deal is. Right now, when I touch the left side of my chin, it sends pins and needles through my lower lip. It makes me wonder if the team in the operating room put my nerves back in the wrong place. I guess it would be slightly amusing though, if I were to scratch my right cheek and have my left ear twitch or something. O_o

Anyway, as I was trying to shave my chin, it felt like I was shaving my lip. I’m going to go out on a limb here and safely assume that no one has ever shaved their lip before, but I can tell you that it would feel extremely odd. Note that my soul patch *shudder* is still growing in full force, unfortunately. I’m going to remove it next time, no matter how weird it feels.

I’ve knocked my inconvenience rating down by 1 point because, without the hindrance of wearing elastics during the day, I can eat a little better and talk quite a bit more clearly.

I finally hit the heat limit on my faithful blender. My heart skipped a beat when it suddenly stopped spinning. I quickly picked it up and tried it using every other plugin I could find, but the comforting sound of spinning blades evaded me. I decided that, before I drove to the shopping center and made an impulse purchase, I’d give it a few minutes to redeem itself. Thankfully, once it cooled down, service was restored! I guess I was trying to blend my soup a little bit too thick last night. You may laugh at how emotionally attached I am to my blender, but you must understand that, if this blender dies, I’ll starve. True story.

Since I’m almost halfway towards the goal of surviving my full 90-day recovery, I’ll only be updating this blog every 2 days from now on. I find myself having to fill certain posts with stories that are completely unrelated to jaw surgery, and while I’m sure some of them are amusing, they’re outside the scope of this journal. The point of this effort is to share with you the checkpoints I’m crossing regarding double jaw surgery, not a bunch of random stories about my apparently amusing day-to-day life.

Also, just a quick administration note: I’ve removed the Facebook comments due to several issues (scrollbars going crazy, comments not loading properly, inability to subscribe to new comments, incompatibility with older versions of Internet Explorer, and so on). It appears the Facebook team still has a little bit of work to do on that plugin. I’ve ported all the comments made through the Facebook box to the normal comments system on each post.

12 Comments

  1. They didn’t recognize you? Crazy! I look a little different, but not that different.

    Glad to hear you’re getting some flavor in your diet. Chewing will be amazing! =)

  2. Hpe u doing gr8 Graham. Yesterday finally I went to class wid my class mates not recognising me and asking if i did a plastic surgery, it made me laugh. I still have to wear my elastics and i remove them to eat in class and even in the uni cafetaria. Its good to have a mum who cooks for you and sends you to class wid a tiffin. I even went to the restaurant to celebrate my aunt’s birthday and had as dinner a maize soup and a creme brulee when all around the table were dishes of meat, chicken and other wonderful foods. I cant wait to chew again.

  3. Eeeeeee, I read that you had a splint but didn’t know what it did really, that makes sense now. Eating is getting better everyday now, although not being sure whether you’re chewing your food or your face without a mirror is very weird. Hope you’re allowed back on the tasty stuff in a week or so

  4. Well, they had to split the roof of my mouth in half , widen it, and fill it in with cadaver bone, so I have this big splint wired into my top jaw to prevent the roof of my mouth from growing back together.

    As a result, I’m not allowed to put any pressure on it for 8 weeks straight, which means I have to be on a pure liquid diet for another week or so still.

    I’m guessing you don’t have a big, gross splint/biteplate in, right? Most people are allowed to eat within 2 weeks of surgery–I was an exception.

    Also this: I’m jealous of you being to eat. 😛

  5. Hi there, I like your funny blog. Seriously though, why you still blending soup? I’m 17 days after double jaw surgery and am pretty much back to eating everything, except crunchy veg but who wants to eat that. I do have to use a mirror to make sure I’m not chewing through my numb lips instead of tasty meat but how are you coping on just soup???

  6. Sounds good.

    Here’s a spoiler: My first suggestion is going to be to upgrade to a Mac. 🙂

    But I’ll gladly help out if you veto that idea.

  7. …..fine…..

    ps. my computer has been doing this weird *blue screen* thing (the screen doesn’t actually go blue, but thats what my computer is calling the error). anyways, its happened twice (yesterday and the day before) so if it happens again i am going to seek out recommendations from my computer friendly amigos….aka. you.

    🙂

  8. Haha, yikes, I can see why you have to moderate everything you say online then. =)

    And Kelly, just think of all the juice that’ll be in each and every post when there are FORTY EIGHT HOURS of jaw-changing opportunity!

  9. I used to have a photo blog, but I put it on hold because I was ramping up for jaw surgery and wanted to talk about that elsewhere. I can’t really have a real, public blog because I’m a journalist and anything can come back to haunt me. If I start something, I’ll let you know, but the best way to keep up with me is through Facebook.

  10. GRAHAM

    that means that somedays when i am at work, i won’t have anything exciting to read about to kill time with 🙁 like i could read up on the news but that stuff is just nonsense

    how about you only post mon-fri and not on weekends, OR i will even let you leave out hump day. actually no that doesn’t work cuz i am a day ahead of you…..how about *your* mon-thurs, so my tues-fri?

    just saying….it could work and we’d BOTH be happy

  11. I plan on keeping this one going right through until Day 90, but I imagine the updates will start to stretch out more and more as that day approaches.

    I’ll have another blog coming up here sometime in the next few weeks (when I find time to set it up), but it’ll be less about my life and more about me ranting.

    I’ll be linking to it from here when it’s online, so stay tuned. 🙂

    What about you? Any other Internet identities? 😛

  12. There’s an evolution of jaw blogs. Once life stops revolving around your mouth, the rest of the world seeps in and posting slows to a halt.

    Do you have a regular blog full of hilarious?

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