TMJ Surgery

Yesterday morning I was in the middle of my doing my physical therapy for my jaw when I realized that at some point in the night I had dreamed about being able to chew something.  That just made me laugh because, really, how sad is it to miss chewing so much that you dream about it?  haha....

So I had surgery a week ago last Wednesday to correct an anteriorly displaced disc in my right temporomandibular joint. (I keep wanting to call it the 'turbo'mandibular joint for some reason....weird)  I've been having pain in that side of my jaw for a very long time now - on and off for a couple of years I guess.  I think it might have all begun back when I smacked the side of my face into a metal pole on the boat dock at the lake house.  Don't ask me how I did that - in too big of a hurry and unaware of my surroundings!  Anyway, I didn't think much of it at the time other than it hurt!  But looking back, maybe that is what started the downhill spiral for that joint.  I finally started hurting enough a few months ago to get an MRI and a consultation from a surgeon.  My dentist sent me to Birmingham to see the guy she calls the "Guru of TMJ disorders."  :)   And it's funny, because I remember saying a prayer on the way down that it would be extremely clear what I needed to do about this.  I was afraid that this might be one more case with me of something where the doctor says, "Well, we can't find anything on your xrays or MRI that indicates anything is wrong, but...."   (that has happened to me with some other aches and pains in recent years)  Well, he took a look at my MRI, asked me what I was feeling, poked around for a second on my jaw and in my mouth and then sat in his chair and sad, "You need surgery... no way around it."  OK, well, I guess that was pretty plain.  :)   Of course, as plain as it was, it still wasn't really all that good news to hear I needed surgery, except that he felt confident that he could fix the problem. 

 

So here's a little diagram.  That disc is supposed to be on top of the Condyle where the Retrodiscal Tissues are so that it cushions things when you open your mouth and bite down on something.  Well, it's not doing such a good job when it's 'fallen off' like that and out of place.  And it makes it quite painful to chew!  So...  that's what needed to be fixed.  The surgery was supposed to be 'arthroscopic.'  He described it to me like it was no big deal.... two little 'poke holes' on my cheek up near my ear, go in and move the disc back in to place, clean things up, and out.  20 to 30 minutes at most.  He did add that if they got in there and things were worse than they could see on the MRI, that they might have to make a small incision just in front of my ear so they could do more work.  I told him if they were going to do that, could he go ahead and add a little nip and tuck and get rid of some wrinkles and my double chin?  :)   I'm not sure he thought that was funny, but anyways -- he said that recovery time would not be bad except that I would have to be on a soft diet with no chewing for 3 MONTHS.   Um.... excuse me?  How long?  That's a long time to not chew anything!  I guess for obvious reasons he didn't want to dwell on that bit of information and I was done and out the door, left to think about what it was going to be like not to eat normally again until summer...  blah.

 

Well, that was that and I started getting ready for surgery - mostly by starting to learn how to make and drink healthy shakes in place of meals a couple of times a day.  That really wasn't too bad, but by dinner time I was ready to eat something!  But I'm glad I at least got a head start on that before the surgery because it's been a big help in the aftermath.  And I've learned a lot of cool things about creative ways to get fruits and vegetables into shakes and really enjoy them!  :)

 



So it would be my luck that, not only did they have to cut a little bit of my hair in prepping me for surgery (don't mess with my hair!!!  haha), but they also ended up finding a lot more damage to my jaw than they expected.  The disc was out of place and there was cartilage that was all messed up, and bone scraping bone, and inflammation, etc...   It was kind-of a nasty scene.  So they did have to do the larger incision and a good bit more work to clean out all the mess.  But it still only took him 30 minutes and I was awake and out and back in Huntsville by mid afternoon.  Not too bad. 

I wish I could say that recovery has been that easy.  It hasn't. I came home with some pretty heavy pain medication and that was great for my jaw, but not so good for my stomach with all of it's sensitivities.  So surgery was on Wednesday and by Sunday I got really sick to my stomach and ended up in the ER for most of the afternoon dealing with that.  I won't go into detail, but it was BY FAR the worst part of this whole experience.  I will definitely be much more careful with pain meds and side effects in the future...

But since then, I have been steadily getting better.  At my follow-up appointment last week, I found out that instead of 3 months without chewing, if I do my physical therapy and am really strict with my soft diet, then I might be able to start chewing after my next appointment on April 10th.  That has me highly motivated to be good!!! :)  So here is a little collage of all the interesting foods I've found that are healthy and that I'm trying to incorporate into my eating these days...
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It's definitely an adventure.  A lot of these things I hadn't even heard of a month ago.  :)

So as of today, my stiches are out (yay!), I'm still numb around the incision site so that feels a little weird, and the side of my head above my ear feels like it is bruised, but apparently that is normal.  And I have this weird little green bruise near my chin that just won't go away...  strange.  The 'jaw stretching' exercises that I have to do 5 times a day don't feel too good, but they are critical to keep the scar tissue from forming, so I'm keeping at it.   And aside from a little bit of aching now and then, I think it's slowly getting better day by day.  I can definitely open my mouth wider than I could before.  I'll let others be the judge of whether I need to be more of a 'big mouth' than I already am.  :)  I'm anxious to be able to start eating normally again because that will be the real test of how well this has worked.  Time will tell...   :)

Well, if you've read all the way to here, you are a trouper.  I didn't think I was going to go this much into detail, but who knows, I might want to remember some of this stuff one day...   or not.  ha. 

Too much to catch up on....

There really isn't much that I'm all that 'OCD' about, but this blog tends to be one of those things.  And by that I mean this...  I hate to just pick up and start with life where it is right now when so much time has gone by and so many things have happened.  I have a hard time not 'recapping' so that I haven't left things out.  The problem is, that gets overwhelming and I just keep putting it off until it gets to be this mountain in my head.  BUT, here I am.  And I am going to attempt a quick catch-up.  And then move on.  :)

December was quite the eventful month:

Jack and I celebrated our 26th Wedding Anniversary.  When you have been married for this long, you take all your kids out for dinner.  ha   We ate at Papou's Greek Restaurant on the square in downtown Huntsville with Anna, Mackenzie, Andrew, Becca and Jessica!   It was very good!  :) 

 

Then we had this little event that really should have had its own blog post - Mackenzie and Andrew got engaged!  This was a big surprise that he pulled off on Christmas morning.  Mackenzie thought he had left to go be with his family on Christmas Eve, but in reality, he had just traveled a little ways away to his friend Seth's house to hide until he could come back Christmas morning and propose.  He rang the doorbell at about 9:30 on Christmas morning in the midst of all the Christmas present opening.  My whole family was there, along with Aunt Carolyn.  He bravely came in to the center of the room and the look of surprise on Mackenzie's face was priceless.  (along with the looks of wonder and fairy-tale awe on the faces of my young nieces! ha)  He got down on one knee and there was so much commotion I'm not quite sure what he said, but she said YES!  :)  

 

 

So since then, we've been in the business of wedding dress shopping (DONE! - but I'm not allowed to post that on-line), setting a date (DONE - Aug 2nd!), arranging for a venue (DONE! - Grace Valley Farms in Shelbyville - Barn Wedding!!), getting a photographer (DONE! - so excited that Jenna is available that weekend and is going to be doing the photos!!!!), Bridesmaids dress shopping.....  (DONE! - such a fun day!). 

 



And I spoke to a caterer this week and got phone numbers for a Wedding Cake decorator and flower shop.  So far I'm not too overwhelmed, but it's only February.  :)

In other news, Anna has been very busy with school and discovering her artistic talents.  She is the Communications Officer for the Art Honor Society at HHS and is looking into Art Schools for college.  She was recently honored at the American Native Arts Awards for a drawing she did on leather...  I think it's pretty awesome.  :)

 

Lots of school and a couple of nagging injuries have kept Anna from competitive gymnastics this year.  She is still training because she just loves being in the gym, but it's been a little weird this winter being out of the competition scene.  We did make it to one meet in Georgia and had such a good time reconnecting with our gym family.

 



Let's see... we also had a fun trip to Winterfest with the teens at church a couple of weeks ago.  Made me realize how much I miss these kids!!!!!

Oh.... and we had some beautiful snow days and a little time off from school....

 

Well, that catches up the major events of late.  In the midst of that, I've been preparing for some upcoming surgery on my jaw for TMJ problems.   I'll write more about that later because I've done about all that I can for now.  :) 

Wow it feels to good to be caught up! 



Grace

I was listening to yet another great podcast from my favorite preacher, Patrick Mead, when the line that is in BOLD down below caught my attention.  I really liked it...  so much so that I took my life in my hands as I was driving to look down at my phone and take note of where he was in his sermon so I could go back to it later.  :)  I found it when I got home and listened more closely to what he was talking about and just had to write it down because it speaks to my heart and what I so often feel when I consider the grace that has been shown to me, even as I look back with sadness over those I have hurt along the way in my life.  I don't deserve it, that's for sure.  And I do struggle with grace, at least in understanding why it has been shown to me.  But it has, in abundance, and I am so very thankful.  I'm trying to think about that a lot in this month where we often focus a bit more on 'thankfulness.'  So even as I am often haunted by my mistakes, I love this idea of 'fighting back' by reminding the devil who has the victory in the end.  And I am thankful for the extravagant grace that bought us the opportunity to be on the Victor's side.

"We have a hard time with grace. 

Many of us are still haunted by things (we've done) that God has forgiven.  We know that God has forgiven us because He has promised that He would, but the scar of what we've done is still there...  

We have repented; we have been forgiven; but we still see the faces (of those we have hurt.)   Do I believe that God will hold (what I did) against me?  No, not at all.  But I understand why people have difficulty with the concept of grace, because even with my faith, it does not erase the memory.  Our sins are always with us...

Now, my general rule of life is this: 
Every time the devil reminds me of my past, remind him of his future.

You need to have a comeback to the devil for these things.  What I do when I'm woken up in the middle of the night and I'm plagued by this is I spend my time thanking God for forgiving me and then asking him to send His Spirit out to do the same for the people that I hurt. 

That's all you can do at that point, and that's probably enough."

If you are interested in the whole lesson, check it out here...

http://eastsidechurch.us/listen-online/    (If that doesn't take you straight to the lesson, it's Theology 101, Part 17) 

California Dreamin'

 

OK, so our trip to California was back at the beginning of August and I'm just now getting around to updating my blog and posting about it. To be honest, I think I've spent the last 2 months feeling like it was going to be too much of a project to get all the pictures up and actually write about it.  Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill!  ha  :)  So anyways, here's the trip in pictures...  and there is no way I can capture how much fun it was to spend the week away with my family or how incredibly beautiful the California coast was, but it was all just breathtaking.  Couldn't have asked for a better vacation! 

 

The flight out was quite early in the morning...  but here's the airport selfie showing that we were mostly awake and happy to be on the way. 

 

 

We flew into San Jose and arrived around noon.  Then we made the short drive up to San Francisco.  My sister had told me not to miss the ride on the Cable Cars down to the waterfront, so we parked our car near the start of the famous Powell/Market Street line and had a good view of how they manually turn the cable cars around while we waited in line for an hour to ride it.  :) 

 

 

I do have to say that, despite the faces being made below by my children who did not want their pictures made, we had a lot of fun on the ride. It was definitely a unique experience and the view riding down to the waterfront was spectacular!

 

 

 Once down on the waterfront, we walked way out on this very long pier out into San Francisco Bay and I took this picture with Alcatraz out in the background.  And as you can see, it was pretty chilly.  Even in the first week of August, San Francisco seems to hover around 65 to 70 degrees all the time.  With the wind always blowing, it feels colder than that!!

 

 

We spent the first night just south of San Francisco, got up the next morning, and started our trek down the famous California 1 Pacific Coast Highway.  Our first stop along the way was Santa Cruz. They have a fantastic boardwalk there with an amusement park, arcades, roller coasters and a gorgeous beach.  We made it there just in time for lunch and a very lively "Step Up" kind of dance and acrobatic show.  The weather was beautiful, but again, not very warm.  That was one of the interesting things about the Northern California coastline...  after years of Florida beaches and vacations, this was so different because it was just so cold most of the time.  This particular day was probably the warmest at, maybe, 75 degrees!  But it was still just so pretty, as you can see.

 

 

After Santa Cruz, we continued on down PCH 1 and I just have to mention here that I was amazed at the miles and miles of produce farms that we passed thru along the way.  Somehow I just didn't expect to see so much farmland sitting right on the edge of the Pacific ocean.  And again, I think this is my Florida bias...  just about every inch of beach property in Florida is used for tourism and vacation homes.  It was just weird to see the lack of commercialism along the California coastline.  And it was all just so beautiful... 

 

A funny moment along the way was when we were passing thru an enormous strawberry farm and saw that it was the GIANT strawberry farm.  I can't remember if it was Jack or Anna that realized that those are the very strawberries that we buy at Walmart every week.  haha.  So we stopped at a fruit stand along the way and bought some fresh strawberries and I swear they tasted like candy.  They were the sweetest strawberries I have ever tasted.  It was amazing!  Of course, now I have a very hard time enjoying the ones that we get from Walmart because they just aren't even close to being as good!!! 

 

One last funny story...  as we were driving along, suddenly, right in the middle of one of the strawberry fields, there was a lone port-a-potty just sitting there.  It was very odd looking.  But what was more funny was Anna pointing it out and saying, "What is that 'pot-a-porty' doing out there?"  Maybe you had to be there, but we got a good laugh out of that.  :)

 

Anyways, moving along.  Our next stop was Monterey and the Monterey Plaza Hotel and Spa.  And yes, it was just as nice and fancy as the name sounds...  this was our 'splurge' for the trip and it was so worth it.  I think we all are agreed that we could have stayed in Monterey forever...  I'm running out of adjectives to describe how nice it all was.  Here are the girls outside of the hotel just before we went out to dinner. 

 

 

This won't mean much to anyone but us, but this is the view from where we ate dinner out on the end of a pier in Monterey.  Off in the distance, as the sun went down, there was this mountain that was still all lit up and honestly, it just looked fake.  Like it was part of a Hollywood set or something.  It caught our attention for a while and I tried to capture it but I think I needed a better camera than my iPhone.  ha  This is one of those 'you had to be there' kinda moments.  :)

 

 

One of our best adventures on this trip was a kayak tour of Monterey Bay.  The guy in the picture below, whose name I can't remember now, (John?) was our guide and he was so much fun!  We spent 3 hours in kayaks paddling around with sea otters and seals popping up around us (so cute!) and all sorts of amazing birds and other sea creatures that we got to see along the way.  We stopped at one point and our guide pulled some star fish out of the water and let us hold them - along with a weird creature that he called a 'sea bunny' that looked more like a big (really big!) slug that leaked purple ink when it got upset.  My hands stayed purple for a while.  :)

 

After the kayaking adventure, we stopped at a beautiful beach and took these pictures...

 

We hadn't really planned on doing this, but a couple that was part of our kayaking trip told us that we HAD to go to the Monterey Aquarium.  So before leaving town the next morning, we took a trip thru the aquarium and it was great -- this is one of my favorite pictures from there... giant octopus! :)

 

So from Monterey, we continued south on PCH1 and traveled thru Big Sur.  This was the stretch of road that I had pictured in my mind of what it would be like to travel along the pacific coast highway.  On one side of the road were the mountains of Big Sur and on the other side of the road were cliffs down to the beach and out to the ocean.  It was breathtaking!  The two pictures below were taken by a waterfall that falls out into the ocean -- so pretty! 

 

This picture just turned out funny because it was so windy.  We were trying to get a picture of us with the really awesome bridge in the background, but Mackenzie's hair ended up being the most interesting thing about this picture!  :)

 

As we were nearing our next destination, Cambria, we saw all these cars pulled over in a parking lot by the ocean and people lined up at an overlook pointing at something.  We were curious to see what everyone was looking at, so we pulled off and took a look...  this is what we saw -- elephant seals!  Everywhere!  There were all just laying around on this beach - huge ones and babies, all over the place.  I don't know if you can see it, but there are two really big ones right in the center of this picture that were fighting with each other.  It was funny to watch. 

 

This is the girls posing in the really pretty garden at our hotel in Cambria.  We were headed out for our tour of the Hearst Castle.

 

I can't take credit for this photo, but this is a photo that we bought of the Hearst Castle.  It is perched on the top of mountain and the view in the OTHER direction from this picture is out to the ocean - this place was beyond amazing!  

This is a view of the roman themed outdoor pool.   Apparently the Hearst family loved to entertain movie stars and politicians - I was trying to imagine the parties they must have had around this pool!  Crazy....

 

Here we are with the view from the front of the castle out to the ocean... How would you like to wake up to that every morning?  Wow... 

 

And as if the OUTDOOR pool wasn't enough, this is the INDOOR pool...  really?  And my picture really doesn't do it justice... 

 

I loved the Hearst Castle.   It was all just so over the top - like a fairy tale.  The only drawback for me was that the drive up to it was fairly terrifying!  The only way up was on tour buses that took about 15 minutes to wind their way up what was sometimes a one-way drive to the top of this huge mountain...  it was a little scary for those of us afraid of heights.  :)

 

SO, after our morning at the Hearst Castle, we left Cambria and the Pacific Coast Highway and made our way inland to take the interstate back up to San Francisco.  (it's a lot faster than the PCH route!)  Another nice surprise along this route was traveling thru Paso Robles and the Central Coast wine region.  I wasn't aware of all the beautiful wine country that we were going to be traveling thru.  I would have loved to stop and tour one of the wineries, but our schedule was tight that day.  But they were pretty to look at as we drove thru!  :)

So we made it back up to San Francisco and this is a picture of us driving over the Golden Gate Bridge...  in the fog.  :)

 

So our last destination on this trip was Muir Woods just north of San Francisco.  We wanted to see some GIANT trees and we found some!  This was a very popular destination -- we had to park about 1/2 a mile away - but it was worth it.  The trees were huge!  Again, it's hard to do it justice with pictures, but I like this one of Jack, Anna, and Mackenzie cause it gives a little bit of perspective on how big the trees are....

 

And this last picture is another one that probably won't be as cool to anyone but us, but the 'hands' are a big mural on the side of the parking garage at the San Jose airport.  If you saw it up close, it's a big wire mesh screen with what looks like ping pong balls that make up the 'hands.'  From a distance, this is what it looks like and it's pretty cool...  :)

 

I left this for last cause it was the best family picture we got on the trip...  and it was the one we had to buy from the gift shop at the Hearst Castle..  ha.   That's us, superimposed on the really amazing gathering room in the castle. 

So that was a quick tour of our trip to California.  It was great to be away with just our family - the older the girls get, the harder that is to do!  So I will cherish this time and these memories -- and I hope to make it back out to the west coast one of these days and see more!! :)