Day 0: D-Day

Today was operation day, and aside from my bite magically fixing itself without surgery, it could not have gone any better. As I had mentioned earlier my surgeon had thought that double jaw surgery was the only way to go, guess who was wrong? That's right! While in the operating room he found that only my maxilla (upper jaw) would have to be surgically altered. What he initially did was drill a small portion of my right lower jaw, but he then decided to work on the upper jaw. Due to my congenital deformity, there was apparently a large gap in my maxilla, and once he fixed that, my mandible(lower jaw) just sort of fell into place. The surgery, which was initially set to take 4 hours minimum, ended up only being 3 and a half and commenced at 11:30. Also, I didn't come out looking like Penelope!

 After leaving recovery and being moved to my hospital room, I wasn't even encountering much pain. They had it extremely well controlled and gave me a little button to push that could release a bit of morphine every 8 minutes if I needed it. The most annoying parts of my stay in the hospital were surprisingly the tube pumping my stomach, which irritated the back of my throat a bit making it hard to swallow anything from my syringe, and frequent potty breaks due to my saline drip. Although it wasn't the most pleasant or restful night I've ever been through, it was no where near as horrific as I had imagined it to be. I owe a lot of what made that night tolerable to my nurses, who were always willing to come and help me out, so huge thanks to Kim, Val, Tina and Sandy, as well as my parents who took shifts sleeping in my room overnight. My second doctor, Dr. Maxilla P. Bearstein, also helped out quite a bit. (Thanks mom)