Day 17

Today's morning was a little brutal with the return of the dreaded jaw jerk. This time, the pain was located only on my left. It jerked early at 7 am, waking me up writhing in pain. The shock-like pain lasted a few minutes, too, much longer than it used to. Afterwards it felt like that joint was misaligned or something. Once again, I'm worried that I'm doing some permanent damage to it. Hopefully not... I'll bring it up with the surgeon next week. I had another jerk at around 9 am and decided to just get up at that point.

The fatigue is definitely still there, unfortunately. However, the swelling seems to be down even more. It's hard to tell from the outside that there is any swelling remaining, and even when I touch, it seems almost all gone! This is probably going to be how my face will look like permanently.

A new background today: inside the car.

The thing that sucks about selfie is that the image is sort of distorted. My forehead looks so huge in these! Tomorrow, I'll ask my husband to take the photos of the day.

Today, we had planned on visiting our closest friends who now live about 50 minutes away. They had a baby on December 1st, a day after my surgery, so we hadn't had the chance to meet her yet! I was excited to see them, but also a little wary of going on a long-ish trip for the first time. It turned out perfectly fine though! I did have two painful jaw jerks on the way there, both time caused by straws and me accidentally moving my jaw to accommodate for it (curse you, straws!).

When my friends saw me, they said my face changed noticeably. I was actually wondering how I looked to other people, since everything was so gradual to me and my husband that it now looks "normal". I was happy to hear that there was indeed a big difference! The other thing is that most of the change is from my profile, and I obviously never see my profile when I look in the mirror, nor did I see it before the surgery. As I've said before, I only saw it in pictures and videos, and I HATED it so much that I'd delete most of them. Now I won't have to!

We chatted for about 2 hours, and eventually my jaw started getting tired, so we knew it was time to go. I wasn't exactly cleared to talk so much, but it was so nice to socialize and see my friends (and their adorable, tiny little baby girl!). We also got to meet their parents, visiting from Australia!

I was completely exhausted when I arrived home. The outing lasted about 4 hours including the driving; the longest I've had since the surgery, so extra fatigue was to be expected! I considered taking a nap, but I had slacked quite a bit on eating, so I had some catching up to do food-wise.

I spent the evening play Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, a game I received at Christmas last year but only got around to playing now. I'm really enjoying the Victorian era of the game, the first of the series set in a time where there was electricity, which is pretty cool :)

Rainy, foggy London in the Victorian era.

The day ended much like it had begun: just as I started falling asleep, my jaw jerked again, sending shooting, shock-like pain through my left joint that lasted a few minutes. I won't lie, I started crying out of frustration. My husband brought me the heating pad to see if it would help. I kept it on for as long as it was hot. I was scared of trying to go to sleep again in case the jerk happened again. That's the biggest problem with this I guess. It sends me into this vicious cycle of not really wanting to go to sleep because I'm so scared my jaw will jerk, but feeling so exhausted that I become really emotional. It hurts so much, even if it's only for a few minutes, and I don't see how taking painkillers would help. It would be like taking Tylenol in case you hit your knee on the corner of a table, for example.

I'm wondering if the problem is that none of my teeth are touching on the left side. Maybe it's making my jaw all spastic because nothing is really anchoring it. Or maybe none of my teeth are touching because the joint is misaligned. I'm even wondering if it's dislocated. It feels like it's trapped, or stuck or something. The right joint feels fine, but the left one feels like any movement is the wrong way. It's hard to explain :P But I'm thinking that if it was dislocated, it would hurt constantly. no? Right now, it only hurts when it jerks to the side. It doesn't even hurt when I open my mouth. Anyways, I'll see how the next few days go. Maybe this is just a period of adjustment because my bands are so much looser. The jerks eventually went away last time, so maybe I just have to be patient. "Be patient" is pretty much the motto for this surgery, haha.

Anyways, when I was ready to try falling asleep again, I figured I would try to sleep on my left side, thinking it might prevent my jaw from moving by putting a bit of weight on it. The joint pain I was experiencing when lying flat/on my side has been much better now. It happens during the first few minutes but eventually dissipate. So I try sleeping on my left, and I'm happy to report that there were no more jerks to wake me up.

Baby steps!