Just when you give up...

That's when you get the motivation to keep going.

I had begun to wonder whether I should continue to write on here.  I've been doing all kinds of work, processing my situation, coping, learning, and just putting one foot in front of the other, but never really knowing if I had anything more to say.  You see, I feel like I may be learning so much, so quickly, that I am having trouble assimilating it.

In fact, I met with my therapist today, and my head was just swimming.  It just seems like there is always something going on in my head that I'm processing, and I'm reading all these books, attending sessions, trying different therapies, that it's all up in there, but the end product isn't clear yet.  What HAVE I learned?  What could I share?  At the end of our session today, I asked: "Is this normal? Am I being over dramatic about it all? Why do I feel so isolated?" And here's what she explained to me:

1. It's normal.  (Aren't all therapists supposed to tell you that?) My situation is pretty unique, yes it's been going on for a year now (yesterday was the anniversary) and people don't understand it.  But most of all - they probably don't know what the right thing to say is.  And I understand that...I really do. I don't place blame on anyone for not knowing what to say. How could they? In fact, this whole situation has given me many gifts, one of which is that I now really understand how people can be walking around with some really big struggles, but functioning normally and even seeming happy.

2. I'm a processor.  (Not the computer kind).  Some people go through traumatic events and just keep on going, without dealing with the trauma.  It seemingly is not affecting them - until it does.  These people delay processing their "stuff".  I don't. I want to deal with it all right away, while I am going through it, and when it's all over (for me, there will be a natural end to the big stuff, God willing), I will likely be done processing it. 
Whether you are someone who processes right away or sometime later is not something you can choose or change about yourself. It's as hard-wired into you as your eye colour.  I'm just dealing with this all at once.  And hopefully, that's the easier way.

3. I am in the middle....the "waiting place"....the most awful place (if you've read Oh! The Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss, you know what I mean).  It feels like not much is happening and I don't have much control of everything. I'm tired of it, and I don't really want to deal with it anymore. 

Potential surgery date & other stuff

Well Hallo there friends,

It's been a while since I have posted. Sorry! Life is just so damn busy.

So what's been happening in my mouth....well, the braces are in there, doin' their thang.  Teeth are moving and it's all pretty positive.  I saw the orthodontist last week for a wire change, and after the power chain on the lowers my teeth were still really sore.  He took it easy on me this month, putting only a slightly-higher tension wire in there and was understanding that I'm in pain.  The first 2 days were still pretty awful, but I was able to eat solid-ish food, which is an improvement.  He said that he's happy with the progress, the top is almost where he wants it, and the bottom is catching up nicely.  Keep in mind that the lower braces didn't go on until a few months after the uppers. 

The 45 tooth that was wildly twisted and tipped has really come around (I know, I could feel it!), enough so that my dentist would now be able to put a temporary crown on it and make me look more normal!  Now I just have to actually schedule time to make the 2.5 hour drive to get it done.

My oral surgeon began trying to coordinate my jaw replacement surgery with my orthodontist, but is jumping the gun just a bit.  It sounds like my teeth won't be done moving until around January, and I can't get the special CT scans done to fabricate the joints until then.  The ortho knows that the more notice he can give of when he will be done his work, the better it is to schedule everything, so hopefully it will all go as planned and I will get a surgery date in January.  I don't know how the oral surgeon's office manages that, but I suppose I'm not the first one he's done.  It takes around 4 months to fabricate the joints, so I guess I'd be looking at surgery sometime in the spring. Maybe for my birthday in May?  Woot.

In other, very exciting, very excellent news, the insurance company has reviewed my case and decided to extend my coverage for accident insurance from 12 months to 24 months.  So if everything goes according to plan, we will be able to submit most claims for all this work before they close it forever.  What a relief!!! I'd heard that it's very hard to get them to make exceptions to this policy, so they must have reviewed my case and understood that it's all very extensive and complicated. Never give up hope!!

On the mental/emotional side, I've definitely been struggling with a lot of things lately. I think that I'm still in the process of learning how best to manage my pain, and how it affects me day to day.  I don't talk about the pain that I have for many reasons...mainly because it's not pleasant to talk about, and the more you talk about it, the bigger a "thing" it becomes in your life.  Saying that, there are definitely times when just touching my head muscles can cause me to be nauseous, and times when the chronic tension headaches really affect my mood, patience, focus, etc.  I definitely am learning that prescription medication is given to you for a reason, and that it helps when you take it as prescribed and not just when you feel like it, and it is not to be feared (especially when it's pretty innocuous, I'm not talking painkillers here).

I'm also accepting this whole situation for what it is.  It seems so obvious to write it, but it's just my lot to deal with this. Everyone gets their challenges, and this is the one that was handed to me. It's not the best, but it's not the worst either.  "Why me?" is such a pointless question to ask in this life...there's no answer, and there never will be. 

And I keep on feeding that courage wolf!!

Muscle pain, again!

Morning Y'all

Ok I've got to get something off my chest.  WHY on earth would Kaitlyn bring Nick into the house with all those great guys? Doesn't she see that he's a total douche?  Amirite???

Ok, that's over with.

I figured it was time for another update, since it's been a couple of weeks now since my wire change and the addition of the torture device powerchain on my lower braces. It's been a rough couple of weeks to be honest.  The pain from the powerchain lasted a few days, longer than I had anticipated.  While I can't really bite into anything very well, there was a time when I couldn't even touch those teeth.  On the other hand, the gaps are closed now. It happened so quickly, which shouldn't be surprising since it hurt so damn much!

I notice that in terms of my jaw and teeth fitting together, things are (as anticipated) getting worse.  When I bite together now, the gap between my front teeth and all along the right side of my mouth is getting bigger.  It also feels like my jaw is moving backward in my mouth, but that could just be mental.

I'm also noticing in pictures of myself that the asymmetry in my lower face is more pronounced, which is troubling.  I know people say they don't "notice" it, but it definitely doesn't look right, and in my mind it makes me look a little.....slow, if you will.  Maybe a little too "jolly", and not in the good sense of the word.

The worst part is the muscle pain.  It is getting so tight and painful that I find myself short-tempered and tired lately.  Last night I was trying to massage it out, and I found myself crying and saying "why did this happen to me?" to the hubs.  No fun.  He suggested I take a muscle relaxer before bed, and so I did.  It definitely helped me to get out of the house this morning and go to work - I had thought I'd be needing to rest up today.  And I might still need that day later this week, it all depends. I'm definitely still feeling it today.

I don't think that it's any secret to the people who know me that I've been trying to get pregnant before I have the big surgery.  Since I'm 34 years old, and my son's turning 4 in September, I don't really have the time to wait until it's all over and done with so I'm trying to just sneak a pregnancy and childbirth into the wait time for TJR.  No biggie.  But that's left me wondering what I'll do if I find out that I am preggo and can't take my anti-inflamatories/muscle relaxants anymore?  I don't take the latter all that often, but I need the AI's to stay out of day-to-day pain.  And the MR's are huge to get me out of a pain crisis.  I'm pretty terrified of the idea....not enough to give up on having a #2, but pretty scared.  We'll have to up the acupuncture/massage budget significantly in that case. 

Well that's it for today folks.  As always, keep on feeding the courage wolf.  Mine's getting more fierce everyday.

New Wires and a Powerchain

Hi Friends!

I know it's been a while since I've written.  I read a lot of blogs about braces, and it always seems that people slack off posting updates when the hardware's been on for a few months, and now I know why.  There's not a lot say!  I have tried to share other aspects of my life here, and I plan to continue doing so.  It's just that when you're doing a lot of introspective work, it's time consuming and doesn't leave a ton of writing time.

Anyways, today's post is about my wire change today.  I had both top and bottom wires changed (for those not wearing the Damon braces system, this is the same as a braces "tightening") and all I can say is Fuck Fuck Fuck. Pardon my language.  My mother in law and I agree that when something is really bad or frustrating, the only real way to feel better is to say a triple Fuck out loud. 

The last wires were on for 6 weeks, and the bottom one partially closed the gap where my 33 was pulled from, and created a bit of a gap between another 2 bottom fronts.  There's still the nasty 35 that's twisted and angled needing space to move.  It has really come along, but it needs more room to straighten out, so now Dr. O put a powerchain on the bottom fronts to close the gaps and make more room for the 35.  And holy triple F it hurts!!!

Part of me really wonders if I am just a really big wuss about the pain, or if it's extra bad for me because of all the trauma to my teeth.  Since the absolute worst of it, what I would unequivocally call PAIN is in my front teeth, while the back are more extremely uncomfortable, I would guess that yes...braces hurt more for me than the average person.  I'm going with that.  It was so unbearable yesterday I considered going home from work (instead I took a painkiller and relegated myself to clearing out my inbox, no complicated tasks for me) and then had to take a muscle relaxer to sleep last night.  I still don't understand why a braces adjustment causes my temporal muscle to tighten up like a vice.  I'm so thankful that I have an acupuncture/massage appointment tonight.

So now it's another 6 weeks until the next wire change.  This pain should subside in the coming days, and hopefully it's smooth sailing from there.   In the meantime, I'm continuing to work on meditation, focused breathing and now I have a couple of mantras that I say to maintain my focus. 
When I am in pain, it's "Easy Day.  I breathe out pain with every breath."
When I want to calm myself and let go, I say "Life itself supports me. I trust in the universe."

So as always: Feed the courage wolf and starve the fear wolf inside you.  Which wolf are you feeding?

Mindful Breathing

Guys, it's been 3 weeks since I've posted!! Things have gotten a little busy lately, so I haven't had the time to write, nor have I had as much time to dig deeper into what I'm learning enough to write about it.  Until now.

This week I'm starting a Stress Response course, and one of the first things we are doing is mindful, focussed breathing.  I've found it to be relaxing, yes, but it's also another factor of the SealFit and Unbeatable Mind programs, and so it must be pretty critical.  The fact that they all practice almost the exact same breathing techniques says something about it.

So a bit about breathing.

There are a couple of mechanical aspects to breathing that need to be addressed right away. First, we should be breathing diaphragmatically.  This means belly breathing, or breathing so that your belly and diaphragm are expanding.  This is the type of breathing babies and children do, and it's the breathing of relaxation.  When we are fully relaxed, this is the way we breathe.  When we are responding to stress (good, bad, acute, chronic) we breathe shallowly and into our chests only.  This doesn't allow for full lung capacity usage, and keeps us in the stress-aroused state, even after the stressor is gone.  So to enable our bodies to relax, it helps to concentrate on breathing into your belly.

The second critical part is that you must breathe in through your nose. Breathing in through your nose helps to humidify the air, and most importantly, enhancing the air with secreted nitric oxide (NO). NO is a potent vasodilator, which dramatically enhances the uptake of oxygen in the lungs.  This is why it's most important to breathe in through your nose, but not as critical to breathe out that way.

There's a pretty simple breathing exercise that works (with practice) to calm down your sympathetic nervous system and counteract all the panicky, fight-or-flight stress reactions in your body.  It can be done almost anywhere, anytime, and nobody would know that you're doing it (even during a presentation or performance!) To start, breathe in through your nose, expanding and filling your belly with air.  Then move to your upper chest and fill it.  Do this slowly, for a count of 4 or more (whatever is comfortable to you) and then hold it in for that same count of time.  Then, slowly exhale for the same count of time, and finally (if you can) hold your lungs empty for the same count.  Do this for 3-4 minutes (or longer, if you can) and with practice, this technique will help to both keep you calm, and calm you down in times of stress.

The key to this is practice.  I'm working now on implementing this technique every day so that my body becomes accustomed to the calming effect.  Over time, it should take no more than a couple of breaths to start the calming effect, and will also train your body to belly breathe all the time, without having to focus on it. 

A final benefit to this practice is that it increases your mental focus.  First, for all the reasons you might think (more oxygen to your brain, etc), but also the focus required to practice this breathing spills over and secondarily serves to get your mind used to focusing - on anything. 

I've been feeling more pain in my jaw joints and teeth recently, and I do find that this practice has helped me to manage that better.

Try this technique for a few days and see how it helps you.   And remember to feed the courage wolf inside you, and starve the fear wolf.

Mental Toughness = Emotional Resiliency

Hello Friends!

As I continue this journey I am on, I want to share some tidbits of learning with you. Today's revelation is the secrets of mental toughness and emotional resiliency.

In his book Unbeatable Mind, Mark Divine shares his top 3 secrets of mental toughness. The first is that Mental Toughness is a choice. You must first choose to control your mind, then you can turn it toward success and hone your skills. Seemingly a simple concept, it goes much deeper than that.  By accepting that it is a choice, you are experiencing a paradigm shift that will change the way you view yourself, your life and the things that happen along the way.  This change in mindset means that now you understand that you are not a product of what happens to you in life; you are a product of your reactions.  No longer are you blown around randomly by the events in your life, seeming to be out of control of the things happening to and around you.  You are choosing where to put your energy, your time and your thoughts. When you change the story you tell yourself about your life, you can change the way that stress affects you.


Second, Stress Kills Mental Toughness. This simple fact was, in a way, freeing to me.  I have found that while I try to work my way through these steps on my journey to inner strength, when stress (or exhaustion) sets in, it's almost impossible to maintain the consistency of meditation, reflection and to focus on the tough things to be tackled inside.  Now that I understand the effect of stress on my mind, I can stop, seek to understand what is stressing me out and why, then harness it and redirect that energy to something positive to counteract it. Giving yourself permission to feel the stress, rather than ignore it, is powerful.

The process to do this is simple, and again it involves choice.  I've used this and I can tell you that it's a powerful way to control your mind and your reactions.  First you must witness the stress happening and how it is affecting you in the moment.  This goes as far as both your mental reactions, and your physical ones.  Shortened breath, a feeling of loss of control and that panicked feeling are all very unpleasant.  Allow yourself to feel them, experience the reaction.  A good tool to use when trying to interdict your stress response is deep breathing. Taking just 5 deep breaths through your nose, filling your lungs and expanding your belly, then letting it all out will serve as a moment of pause while it changes your physiology. Deep breathing through your nose activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which turns off all the negative fear responses of your sympathetic nervous system.  Then, interdict that experience. Choose to stop it in the moment and acknowledge that you are not going to let it continue.  Then, redirect that energy to something positive. 

Finally, most of what we consider Mental Toughness is actually Emotional Resilience. This means that you are able to easily and quickly bounce back from a setback.  This is also a skill that can be trained, and needs to be exercised to be maintained. 

The process of training emotional resiliency is much like that of reacting to stress.  First, witness your negative reaction, then interdict it to stop it and observe the underlying emotion that is causing that reaction; why do I feel this way? What is making me react the way I am?  Second, change your initial reaction to whatever the opposite emotion is.  If it's fear, change it to courage. If it's jealousy, change it to acceptance. Then, engage this new emotion and all of the actions and feelings that go along with it and continue on with whatever you were doing. 

I can tell you that I used this exact technique when I was having a negative reaction to something positive that was happening in my life.  Instead of feeling joy and appreciation for what was happening, I was feeling guilt for being so fortunate.  I was berating myself for making a choice that supported my own happiness and focusing on all the ways that I could have made a different choice that would have seemed less selfish.  Once I recognized what I was doing, I physically took myself to a room where I could be alone and stopped myself from continuing down that rabbit hole.  I looked at how I was feeling and why; then I chose to give myself permission to do this for myself.  It is what I had been told several times to do.  It is something that will bring me peace and joy and I deserve it.  I appreciated my good fortune and felt the joy of looking forward to it.  Once I had calmed my mind and stopped beating myself up, the stress went away and I was able to continue my day without those negative thoughts and self-talk in my mind. 

Please try these techniques today - and remember to feed the courage wolf inside you!

My 3rd Opinion

Hi Friends,

I've been trying to get up the energy to post again this week, but to be honest I didn't really have much great to say.  It's been a bit of a rough week for me, and not in terms of my health or jaw situation. But I've received my final report from Best Doctors Canada, and I thought that would be a great reason to write.

To start, I'll just talk about what's been going on.  I work for a large company in the Oil & Gas industry in Canada.  So does my husband, although at a different location.  You might be aware that oil prices have fallen sharply in the last six months, from over $100/barrel to under $45 in the first quarter of this year.  As a result of the poor short to long-term outlook for oil prices (not to be confused with gas prices!) our company announced in January that they would be reducing our workforce by 1,000 people.  While this number seems huge, consider that we also have a lot of contract workers in the upstream business (oil sands, in particular) and we didn't really know how many of those 1,000 would be from full time employees, and if so, who and where.  Well this week we lost 4 people from our relatively small team, one of which was my work husband (..not real husband).  I've been deeply affected by the unfortunate circumstances for everyone, but this loss was really personal for me, and I'm quite sad.  Another person who is leaving is my boss, who is being asked to retire at the end of April.  He's been the only one allowed to stay beyond the end of the day of hearing the news.  Our new boss is moving here from Calgary, and I don't know anything about him except for his name.  It's a sad and stressful time.

On top of that, my dog Roxy took ill last weekend and by Wednesday had to go see the vet.  I had been consulting with my best friend who actually IS a vet, but she lives out of town.  Upon her recommendation, I brought Roxy in.  It turned out that Roxy was so ill that she needed to be hospitalized, and stayed there overnight for 2 nights on IV fluids, antibiotics and anti-nausea/diarrhea medications.  Only today has she started eating again after 3 full days of not eating at all.   I am to pick her up soon, and I can't wait to get her home for some love and rest.

So...it's been a stressful week, y'all.

But in GOOD news, today I received my final report from the Best Doctors Canada service.   If you don't know about this service, it's a company that offers help finding doctors,  getting second opinions and referring you to specialists.  It's often a part of your benefits package at work, but most people don't know about it.  I had seen it on my benefits before, but it wasn't until my mom told me about someone she knew who had used it that I found out what they really do.

I engaged them, and they took my history, assigned me a nurse and a case manager and went about gathering all of my physician's notes, test results, images and the like.  They then had their internal physician review the information, and sought out a specialist (in my case an Oral MaxilloFacial Surgeon - OMFS) for their opinion on my treatment and diagnosis.

In my case, my information was sent to Dr. Bonnie Padwa at the Children's Hospital Boston.  Essentially Dr Padwa confirmed that my condyles are indeed broken and shortened.  They are not dislocated, but they are shortened which has resulted in a downwards and backwards rotation of my jaw, and an open bite. The limitation in opening of my jaw could be due to muscle spasming, and could be improved with aggressive physical therapy (PT).

Dr Padwa did agree that my condyles should have been treated with internal fixation (surgically fixing the broken condyles with pins/plates), and that it is too late for that now that so much time has passed.  She thinks that I should get a new CT scan to confirm if there is ankylosis in my joints and to confirm that my mandibular fracture has healed.  Ankylosis basically means joint stiffness. If there is ankylosis, she recommends the joint replacement surgery.  

If there's no ankylosis, she suggests that PT could improve my mouth opening and that a less complicated LeFort 1 osteotomy surgery could be performed to move my upper jaw into alignment with my lower jaw.   Um, how about no thanks??

So my feelings about this report are essentially that Dr P (my original Dr P) is correct in his diagnosis and treatment plan.  Even if there is no ankylosis in my joints, I'm not really interested in surgically moving my upper teeth to a screwed up position to match the already F'd up lower jaw.  (Pardon my language, I just don't see this as an actual option).  I'd still end up with a messed up jaw, but I'd be able to bite.  Great, but I'm not interested in creating more deformity. 

To be honest, though I might sound upset in this post, I'm not.  I was deeply convinced that this 2nd (or 3rd) opinion was going to confirm the TJR (total joint replacement) and I was right! (Who doesn't love saying that?!)