My Double Jaw Surgery: Day 6 After Surgery:

Our Amazon Echo (aka Alexa) could understand my garbled speech this morning, so that was an improvement! Oh, the little things...

Minor improvements in pain and swelling today, but my neck still looks like it belongs to a zombie.

I realized my big mistake in planning this whole surgery is that I could have had an epic Halloween costume had I got my timing right...

Most of my discomfort is now coming from my TMJ, which would be classified as TMD (temporomandibular disorder). The muscles supporting the mandible were stretched (and some were cut) to allow 10mm of anterior movement of the lower jaw. I was fully aware that TMD can worsen with a BSSO (the type of mandibular jaw surgery I had), but I don't think I understood until now that that is what is contributing to a significant amount of my discomfort, and probably has been the whole time. Knowing this is somewhat useful though, as I can focus on relaxation of the musculature, gentle massaging around the joint and condyle, massage of the adjacent muscles that were not involved in the surgery (especially the temporalis which fans out above the ear), soft foods (like I have a choice), lasering the joint and surrounding musculature, and ice.

I've kept up with 2 daily sessions of 30 minutes of meditation, and now I can add visualization of relaxation of the musculature around the TMJ into the mix as well.

My upper lip still does not want to move, although now I do have the ability to produce an Elvis-like curl at the corner of my mouth.

One healing modality I added into the mix today was use of our infrared sauna. Anytime you sweat provides detoxification for your body, but the advantage of an infrared sauna is that rather than simply heating the ambient air to draw out toxins, it will heat your core to assist in expelling toxins.