Day 20

Today turned out pretty busy, but also kinda scary.

It started out a bit late again since I slept for as long as I could as got up around noon again. I'm stuck in a late-ish schedule and won't go to sleep until 2-3 am. I should break away from it, but it's hard! Anyways, once I was up, I resolved to achieve a few goals for the day:

1. Do laundry
2. Finish making the Christmas video I was working on
3. Make (Christmas) cookies for the neighbors and leasing office

Not such an intimidating list when you didn't have surgery less than 3 weeks ago, but it's a bit of a challenge when you did. Especially if you haven't done laundry in about a month... Yikes. The piles and piles of clothes! I should have taken a pic, but I forgot.

All went well, I put loads after loads in the washing machine/dryer while working on my video, stopping every once in a while to fold the still warm clothes. I did this until late in the evening, when I had my very last load of socks and boxers. I put the hamper in front of the dryer and pushed everything in, but some of the socks fell on the side. I quickly bent over to grab them, but I miscalculated where my chin was or something, and I hit it pretty hard on the plastic handle of the laundry basket. My jaw opened slightly and was shoved backward, sending shooting pain into my joints just like when I have one of those annoying jerk.

The blue handle is where I hit my chin. Traitor!

Guys, to say that I was freaking out is an understatement. I kneeled on the floor like a true drama queen, holding my jaw in pain, wondering how much damage I had caused. Gory images of my screws shooting out, my jaw bone splitting, blood gushing flashed in my mind and I started crying. My husband came to see what was happening and tried to calm me down. The pain did receded, and there was no blood. I touched my jaw, everything seemed in place. The only pain I felt was in my joint, but I was still scared that I had somehow knocked something out of place or unbalanced my bite or something. I tried to google it to see if it had happened to anyone else after surgery, but I had no luck finding anything. I was tempted to text my surgeon, but I didn't want to bother him at 10 pm if it was nothing. So we decided to wait until the morning.

You can see the redness where I hit it.

For the next hour or so, I was very nervous and kept checking to see if there was any new swelling, but nothing happened. I finally started to calm down enough to get started on the cookies. I wasn't going to let this stop me from achieving my goals!

So I made the cookies, which smelled and looked delicious, and hopefully tasted delicious too but I couldn't tell because I couldn't eat them. Bummer. I made my favorite, signature cookies: crispy salted white chocolate oatmeal cookies. Not exactly "Christmas" cookies, but they are amazing. If you haven't had jaw surgery yet, you should try making them before you have your jaw banded shut!

I was tempted to blend them with milk,
but I knew it would be a disaster.

I did indeed finish all my goals by the end of the day, even the Christmas video from 2014 AND 2015. And just so that I don't keep you in suspense, I'm writing this a day late, so I did text my surgeon in the morning and he said "if everything is the same, it should be fine", so... Good? I'm seeing him on Friday, so maybe he'll take an x-ray just to be sure. He didn't seemed as panic about it as I was, so maybe our bones are much stronger on week 3 than we think? Crossing fingers I didn't cause any trouble.

Sleeping was very hard though. It does seem like I at least aggravated my calmed-down joints and had a few jaw jerks while trying to fall asleep, which freaked me out and gave me a bit of insomnia, lying in bed trying to analyse every little pain and thinking my jaw was messed up. I ended up falling asleep at 5 am. Ugh.

Eventually I'll get the rest I need, right?

To finish this off, here are the pics of my face on day 20. Again, not much change:

Oh, one last thing: I'm stitches free! I removed the last two little bits remaining with tweezers when I brushed my teeth. They were barely hanging on by a thread. Get it...? :P