broken mandible

[newe english]

i was just telling my buddies how good my (recently broken in half) foot felt finally. and then i decided to go a little too big to flat. my mandible is in three separate pieces now. There's a chunk of bone poking through and rubbing my tongue. Everytime i swallow my bones grind. Surgery on tuesday.

anybody have recommendations on facial reconstructive surgeons in the gallatin valley area?

a four hundred dollar full face is looking like it would have been a cheap remedy now.

[tone capone]

Super sorry about that, sounds like it sucks. Vibes and good luck. Let me buy you a beer sometime.

[newe english]

thanks man, really do appreciate it.

just got out of surgery and i can barely get a straw into my mouth. 2 weeks wired, 6 weeks liquid diet, 12 'til i'm a normal boy again. for future reference, Dr. James Barton did well(hopefully, not quite sober yet), and i'd recommend him to any other bozemanites with fucked up faces. i guess he's popular with the racer crowd too. his office is across the intersection from the stadium.

[splat]

OUCH! Heal fast, mang.

[newe english]

thanks splat. i think its about time for some (more) drugs.

[tone capone]

Glad to hear you got the surgery over with, keep us updated.

[auvgeek]

Super shitty mang. Had mandible and maxilla reconstructive surgery done two summers ago. Don't recommend it, haha. (Btw: if anyone needs a doc in the Seattle area, send me a PM. Really impressed with the guy who did the surgery.)

No specific advice for you, other than make sure you take the pain meds long enough. I hate drugs, so I got off of them like three days after the surgery, and it hurt like nothing I've ever experienced. (This is after having hip, knee, and a clavicle reconstruction.) So just make sure you give it a bit.

Also: I was on a 6 week liquid diet and lost a bunch of muscle mass because I wasn't getting enough nutrition and I couldn't work out (doc was worried about me clenching my jaw while working out). So if I were you, I'd try to stay vigilant about getting a good 1700-2000 calories a day no matter whether you feel like drinking the food or not. I dropped down to about 155 (I'm 5'11"), and a noticeable portion of that was muscle. (Having knee surgery 5 weeks later was probably a contributing factor.) Also, I'd go for movies or netflix - you don't notice it, but there're SO many damn food commercials on TV. Made me SO hungry for a hamburger.

If you can afford it, the best meal on a "liquid" diet for me was grilled ahi tuna. (Cosco has relatively-decent prices). I could mush it up enough with a fork that I could eat it without chewing (you get pretty good at pressing food into the top of your mouth with your tongue to break it up), but it was SO flavorful. Almost like real food.

Good luck mang.

[mcclintock]

how do you take your meds w/o a mouth? nose inhalation, anal suppository, iv needle, drips in your eyes?

[auvgeek]

They rarely wire the mouth shut nowadays (maybe in exceptionally bad cases). So they usually give you liquid opiates, which you take like cough syrup. Frankly, I hated them. Made my whole mouth/throat numb. One dose, and then I forced them to give me the pills. However, they did swab my nose with cocaine before surgery so they could intubate through the nose.

How ya doing newe english?

[Jethro]

A few years ago, a co-worker went too big on his moto and landed on the flats. He came down on the handlebars and broke his jaw in three places. In surgery, they could not get the bone out of his jaw muscle, so they wired his jaw shut and let it heal. When they unwired the jaw, his tooth alignment was so off they had to rebreak his jaw and he went through the whole ordeal again. I hope you have a better surgeon than he did. Heal up well

[newe english]

shit, just saw this. sorry, i've definitely been somewhat of an astronaut for the past week. thanks for responding

i've been taking liquid hydrocodone religiously every four hours since the surgery(brooks--by way of butthole ), somewhat less so now that i can kinda get by without it. mommy bought my brother a plane ticket to bozeman to come be my babysitter for a week, and force feed me choc/peanut butter milkshakes and v8. considering the circumstances it's not too bad. i'm also just kinda fucked up on meds the whole time, so i'm somewhat indifferent.

though i am getting pretty fucking sick of being wired shut. can't lick my lips, can't clean the peanut butter covered spoon when i'm making shakes, can't really drink anything faster than the small gap between my canines on the left side of my mouth allows me to(right side is still pretty sensitive), and worst of all, i can't brush the insides of my teeth. my tongue is trapped in a dungeon of doom for another week. talking isn't a walk in the park either, though who needs to do that? i almost wish i busted a tooth out, so i could stick a straw through and actually drink like a normal person. but i'm sure in the end i'll be glad i didn't.

as far as surgery went, i don't really remember that day at all, arrived at the office fucked up, left fucked up. but i do know that Dr. Barton cut down inside my lip to the break on the right of my chin and put in 1(2?) plate(s) then sewed me back up in the front, and together through the gums in the front, then wired all my teeth and strung me shut. i think the break on my left side under the fossa is just chillin, healing in place, hopefully straight(in the x-ray it had overlapped a good cm). all my teeth seem to be pretty in line, though i don't really know if everything will line up like it did a week ago. time will tell.

by the way, BIG thanks goes to the BIG SKY SKI PATROL for dealing with my(and everyone else's) broken ass. you guys made sure i wasn't really fucked up before venturing into the canyon back to the ER in bozeman. i know you guys are just doing your jobs, but i also feel like ski patrollers aren't thanked nearly enough for keeping all of us crazies safe out there. so thanks again guys

i'll see if i can get some gnarly pictures up here in the next couple days. it was pretty crazy, having a two separate halves of a jaw, both floating freely every which way.

[auvgeek]

How ya feeling mang?