Surgery 9- June 30, 2011

This was my most recent surgery this past summer. The week before it was crazy as we were getting ready for my oldest brother's wedding on the 26th and my surgery was 4 days later! Family was leaving and we got a day's break before my surgery. I'm always amazed at my mom's incredible strength she has as we go through these crazy times!
The process to this surgery was kinda confusing. We had a check up in April where we thought we were going in to see about having my nose surgery.  My nose has a deviated septum and makes breathing rather hard, so I will eventually have a surgery to correct this. But before we can correct the nose and rebuild it I have to have a strong supportive nasal base. Which the nasal base is the upper jaw. Before we could build on to the nasal base we had to make sure my upper and lower jaw were in best alignment as possible. So the possible surgery that was on the table was having to have my upper jaw cut and pulled forward and moved down and my lower jaw cut and pushed back and then wired shut for a few weeks to correct the alignment of my jaw. But I had X-Rays done and it showed that my jaw was pretty much in the best position as possible.Thanks to my orthodontist, he overcorrected my jaw when I was younger which affected the placement of it now...turned out to be quite the blessing for me! :)  So now that my jaw was set in the correct place, next came the strength of the nasal base. Because of having been born with a cleft lip and palate I had very little to no bone at all in the front upper jaw of my mouth. Because of this there was not enough bone to support building a nose off of it as well as inserting permanent dental implants into the bone. We talked about bone grafting from my skull and placing it into my mouth, but my doctor decided that there was another way to make this possible, which leads us to what surgery 9 was all about.

Surgery #9-

This is me after I woke up after surger #9...

as well as Jojo, he's been with me every surgery I've gone into :)

       I wore an appliance that helds 5 fake front teeth on a retainer that hooked into two metal posts that were screwed into my upper jaw, for this surgery I had to remove this appliance for a few weeks. My doctor, Dr.Dierks, cut along the gumline where these 5 front teeth go and then cut back up under my nose on both ends of the incision. He then took a titanium mesh screen bent it and filled it with a "bone pudding". This bone pudding was a mix of cadaver bone powder (someone's dead crushed up bone) as well as some of my blood platelets. I figured out that they drew my blood from my ankle, because when I woke up in the recovery room  the nurse told me she was going to remove the IV from my ankle, something I didn't have in me when i went into the operating room. And so my doctor took the titanium mesh screen with the bone pudding and put it into my upper jaw and screwed it in. I have 5 screws in my jaw currently, 3 around the nasal base and two screwed into my gum line...Hopefully my body will take over the bone powder and begin to grow my own bone from that.

I now have 4-6 months to grow this bone in my upper jaw. With much prayer I believe that this bone will grow and continue to stregthen. Not only will this bone create the nasal base needed for next summer's nose surgery but it will also give my upper jaw the strength in the gumline for my next surgery sometime in the next 2-3 months. It is important that this bone grows and strengthens, because this next surgery my doctor will put in the base of the dental implants into this bone and if it's not strong enough or if there is not enough of it then the bone will not take the bases. From my last check up, which was two weeks out from my surgery, my doctor said that the bone was looking great! It has been 2 and a half months since my surgery, we are continuing to pray that this bone grows.

This surgery wasn't terribly painful. It was painful for the first few days as I was on painkillers and layed on the couch and drank everything I could. I was on a liquid diet for 11 days...dropped around 8 pounds from this surgery. The diet was painful, I was constantly hungry but was limited to what I could put into my mouth. My usual was a protein drink in the morning with my medicine then at lunch I drank soup from a mug and same with dinner. After a while those two things were no longer appealing to me as I started to stop drinking my protein drinks and that's where my weight dropped even more, because I wasn't willing to put the effort forward to take the best care of myself. I was lacking protein, vegetables and vitamins. But after the 11 days I was able to "graduate" to a soft food diet, a diet I will be on until May of 2012. As I will go through another surgery which will require the same diet as this one. I was sooo thankful to my family, and mostly mom who was always by my side and always there to help me when I was having a hard time or when I was in pain. I am also extremely thankful for my friends who came to visit me while I was recovering, I can't tell you enough how much that meant to me. It's always hard to go through something by yourself, but knowing that you have friends and family there by you as you push through it makes it all the better. So I thank you so much. I also thank all the people who prayed constantly for my surgery and to those who are still praying for this cadaver bone to continue to grow. That's what's needed most, prayer. This surgery was hard like any other, but just like the rest, my God is always with me in the times I need Him most.

(and we don't have a picture of my mouth currently because we couldn't get a very good one of the titanium mesh starting to poke through, plus the inside of my mouth looks kinda alien and didn't think the readers would  like seeing it, as it was slightly bothersome to my mom and I haha)