So…I'm getting double jaw surgery?

*Warning - Heavy post alert*

 I've been umming and ahhing  whether to actually start this blog post. One because this process has already been going on for quite a long time already (three years and counting) and didn’t really know how to start when I’m already so far down the line into my treatment. And two, I’m not even sure that anyone would be remotely interested in little old me and my jaw.

However, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and just start typing about my jaw surgery journey as I’d quite like to look back on this one day and remember the hefty process I went through.

 I suppose we start from the beginning, when I was a pre-teen around 11/12 my dentist told me that I needed braces, obviously at this age you’re actually excited to have them because everyone else at school was having them. Even cooler for me because I was the first out of my friends to have them put one, so in a way I was the guinea pig of our friendship group. I had the typical train track braces on for about four years as well having four teeth out due to overcrowding (I have a small jaw and too many teeth!) Halfway through my treatment my orthodontist as well as my regular dentist explained that I had something called an ‘open bite’ which is where your front teeth don’t actually touch, they told me that I would have to have surgery to correct this. But being a 13 year old who has never has any type of surgery I freaked and declined the opportunity to consider surgery (even if I had accepted I would still have to wait until my body had stopped growing to even start the process of surgery) and just went on my day to day life struggling to bite into everyday foods like sandwiches and pizza, at least I knew I wasn’t having to have surgery.

 Fast forward a few years and I’ve finished school, braces have come off and entered the working world. I started to experience pain and more overcrowding in my mouth, this was due to my wisdom teeth starting to make an appearance but they were growing sideways and forcing all my other teeth closer together. But still, it wasn’t enough of a drastic change for me to change my mind about surgery even though It was always an option, as my dentist had pointed out to me every time I visited her.

 As I grew older, I noticed my issues with my jaw a lot more and started to come round to the idea of surgery. Like I said earlier I struggled to bite with my front set of teeth which this led to me biting quite hard on my back molars to compensate my lack of bite at the front, as time went on the strain on my back teeth and my jaw would leave me in agony. I was noticing more about my jaw not feeling right, my lips only meet when I make a conscious effort to do so, meaning that most of the time I breathe through my mouth. I could no longer look at pictures of my side profile; my upper front teeth had grown on an angle where they were tilted backwards at the gum line causing my open bite to be worse. Long story short I went back to my dentist and asked about the surgery.

Once all my dentist referrals were complete I firstly had to go on a waiting list to have my four wisdom teeth removed  and because of the way they had grown I had to go under general anaesthesia which made me face my fear of surgery.  After a lot of crying to my mum in those sexy gowns and stockings I was wheeled into the operating theatre and then what felt like 20 minutes I awoke in the recovery room next to what I though was Arg from TOWIE (A British reality show), it was probably the anaesthetic to be honest…

 I’m now more than three years into my treatment and I’m now on the home stretch to finally having my jaws realigned as well as a genioplasty on the 27^th January 2017.

 Keep checking back for more posts of my journey! Especially the one when I was supposed to have my surgery in November 2016!

Wherever you may be during the road to jaw surgery, I'd love to hear about your journey, or even tips/recipes you may of used during your recovery!

xx