Rituals and Progress
I am now 4 weeks and two days past surgery!
Yesterday I drove for the first time since the operation, and it was along a sort of a narrow cliff road too! I'm not sure how exactly my mother thought I was driving, but it must have been a little bit fast because she said she could tell I had to pee. :P We went back to the Arroyo Burro Beach to see the gorgeous sunset. I'm seriously bowled over by the beauty of the sunsets here. Still weird here without Dad and Mark. We've talked on Skype a few times.
I seem to be in something of a routine up here. I get out of bed at 9:30 am, go downstairs and drink a smoothie or rice cereal/cream of wheat and some juice, putz around a bit. Then shower and change my elastics and do my jaw exercises. Some more putzing occurs, rounded out by more meal drinks, and some translation work. We usually try to go out in the late afternoon a little bit, although we went out a little earlier the other day and made it to the shopping district on State Street. I come back, do more exercises and elastics, there are more meal drinks, wash, rinse, repeat for the evening. We usually end up with either both of us watching TV or Mom watching TV and me working on the computer. Somehow we've ended up going to bed at like 1 am, which is not the best routine to get into. Looks like I'll actually be checking out of this hotel on January 20th and coming back to L.A. on that day.
Keeping up with this schedule of liquid nutrition and jaw exercises/elastics is kind of exhausting. I don't think I'll be going out a whole heck of a lot for the remaining 4 weeks or so of the 3-time-a-day ritual.
I saw Dr. Gunson on Wednesday, and he looked around my mouth at my bite and said everything looks great! Class 1 bite on both sides, and overjet of 0! So far, even though I can't open my mouth most of the time because I'm banded shut, I'm not having muscle fatigue in my face because my bite fits! I do have tons of other weird feelings in my face though. I should write about them because they might change from entry to entry. My lower lip still feels tingly and tight. I can now feel the left side of my lower lip when I touch it, but not the right. I feel the left and right sides of my chin but not the middle. From time to time I get these electric shock feelings in my cheeks, that must be some nerves getting feeling back. I'm doing a lot of lip-puckering motions and trying to pronounce my B's, P's, and M's as much as possible to stretch the scar tissue on the other side. Slightly off-topic, Mom had the idea to make taking my Cal-Mag-Zinc-D pills easier by coating them in honey, and it worked!
It's really weird when I look at pictures of myself from like 4 years ago. My chin looked more forward then than it did before the surgery. Somehow over the course of 4 years, everything just slipped back and opened up. Makes me kind of worried about something like that happening again, but at least this time I have good doctors looking out for me, for anything of that kind.
Mom and I are going out to Montecito beach for a little while. I have some more things to say later.
Things I want to talk about: Tangled, Doctor Who, Torchwood, Drinkable meals, stcolapop.