q & a

for some reason blogger is being stupid and not letting me reply to comments so let me respond to some questions that were posed to me in comments here:

who was your surgeon?

my surgeon was dr. gary warburton.  he's with the university of maryland medical center and dental school.  because he's a professor, he is also teaching maxillofacial surgery residents. i know you might get nervous about residents, but they were totally amazing, caring, competent, and professional.  i got to know them well and will actually miss them.  i had not one complaint!  i would whole-heartedly recommend dr. warburton and his team.  http://www.umm.edu/omsurg/team.htm

did you have surgery on both jaws?

yes i did.  my bottom jaw was more crooked than my top, but both were off kilter.  to have them line up the best i had to have both.  now, just my lips are crooked! :)

how much did your surgery cost?

without insurance coverage, it would have been about $51,000.  this is the main surgery itself including anesthesia, hospital stay, etc.  it does not include pre-surgery appointments or post-surgery check-ups, or my second surgery i needed to have because of my infection.

why did you not have braces?

i first went directly to dr. warburton (the surgeon) with my problem, after some online research, just for a consultation.  i did this because i'd been tossed around in referral process for several months - when i would present my problem, no one seemed to know exactly who to refer me to.  i ended up once at an ear nose and throat doctor, for example.  dr. warburton did confirm that my issue was something that was sometimes fixed with the type of surgery that he performs.  before anything else though, he sent me to his orthodontist colleague (dr. steven seigel in glen burnie, md) to check me out to see if ortho could fix my bite issue without surgery.  i already had like a decade of ortho when i was younger but they didn't address my asymmetry problem, or if they did, it didn't work.  my mom doesn't recall them really mentioning working on asymmetry, rather they were trying to widen my jaw.  in fact, my previous orthodontia may have contributed to worsening my asymmetry.

anyway, i did have nice straight teeth.  dr. seigel took a load of xrays and molds and concluded that my problem could not be fixed with orthodontia alone and it would require surgery.  he also decided that it would be an option for me to choose to have braces or not.  with braces, he said, i would get a more perfect result.  the main reason being, things could be tweaked post surgery to line it all up perfectly.  but he felt that braces would not be required and i would get a good result without them.  i was lucky in this way because my teeth would still line up well after the surgical movement.  i think this is because of the axis on which they moved my jaws (up and down) is different than those of you that have over and under bites (forward and back).  based on the cost of braces, time involved, and pure annoyance and vanity factors, i chose not to.  also, i figured i could have braces later in life if i was dissatisfied with the placement.  my teeth are slightly on a slant now in my mouth, because my previous braces as a teen made my teeth straight on a crooked jaw, but it's not super noticeable and it's not bothering me.

scar tissue

one hour before surgery - a marked woman (to confirm which side)

one day after surgery - a bit bloated and crooked again

now eight days out, my wound appears to be healing nicely.  stitches are starting to get loose and i cut one out myself tonight because it was bothering me.  while i was doing that, for the very first time, i noticed all the scar tissue from the first surgery around the perimeter of my mouth where my gum meets my lip and cheek tissue.

i hadn't really examined it before, i guess because that area was tender for so long, i avoided it, even just looking at it.  it has spidery white webs in it, some parts are thicker than others, some parts are higher and lower.  when you stretch it out (like by pulling out my lower lip) it becomes even more apparent that it is super webby scar tissue.  it's freaky looking and grossed me out.

i guess i was suprised to discover how irregular/unnatural it looks in comparison to the way that meeting point between the lip and gum did before.  and although of course i did know this already, it also is showing how the entire rims of my mouth on top and bottom were cut open.  it's clear that anyone who examines my teeth/mouth in the future will be able to tell i had something hardcore done!

adios, uno placo

today i had just one plate removed! they didn't want to do any more "invasion" than necessary and since i had only had problems with the one, that was the decision.

i'll be pissed if i get problems in another one in the future, haha, but this makes my recovery easier!  and i'll still be able to go, "hey feel my creepy plate" as a stupid human trick in the future.

unfortunately i could not keep or see the plate (i asked) because it is a biohazard thing and had to be sent off for testing because of it being "colonized."

the incision was about 3cm, everything went well, and they scraped out some infected tissue around the plate.

the cool thing seemed to be that they checked out my bone healing while they were "in there."  my bone cuts apparently healed awesomely and they said you could barely tell i'd had a BSSO.  i've got bone-healing SKILLZ.  :D

have some pain (duh) and some swelling (also duh).  it's cool though!  much less scary than last time: