(Not) Eating with your jaw wired shut

This is an incredibly important topic to cover, and I thought it deserved it's own post. Having your mouth wired shut means that you will be eating a liquid only diet the entire time.  No breaks, obviously. This simple fact is bad enough, but I took it much more personally, unfortunately, and this is because of the reason you are eating liquids: because everything you injest has to fit either through your teeth or around and in behind your molars! and that, my friends, is ACTUALLY the worst part of the liquid diet.

Dr M gave me this horrific looking system for eating: 

And, might I add, he gave me just 1 of these setups. Note the tube attached to the already sad-looking syringe. The tube is made of rubber, and tastes like it. I think it was supposed to thread around behind my molars for direct injection into my mouth, but it wouldn't fit, and believe me, I tried.  I just found it incredibly sad to have to physically inject food into my mouth, and combine that with the taste of latex with my already sad soups and smoothies.....well, I actually tried to scream at the top of my lungs out of frustration. I think I loosened some wires by accident.  I wish I could have just quit eating for the duration of my wiring.

Well, after about 2 days, this thing was not cooperating, being that it's designed for a single use. It became incredibly hard to suck up food with it, and then one day my hubs was wrestling some soup into it out of a mug and the whole contraption just seized. The mug went flying onto the floor, spraying soup and broken ceramic everywhere. 

So my word of advice: go get more, ASAP. I found this brand to be the best -
Terumo 60 cc/mL Catheter Tip syringe.

So here is a list of what sustained me over the time. 

- Puréed and watered-down soups

- Smoothies with no fruits with seeds of any kind (they get stuck in your teeth/wires and aren't worth the struggle) 

- Cream of wheat, with lots of cream 

- Yogurt

- Pudding (made with cream, for the calories)

- And, at one point, a peice of cake in the blender with ice cream and milk.

Here's a picture of an attempted meal:

Spaghetti through the blender and mashed potatoes (packaged, watered down). The spaghetti didn't work so well....it got stuck both in the syringe AND the wires in my mouth. The disappointment was epic. Much more than it should have been, but I was both chronically starved and starving at this meal time. There are a lot of mountains to be made of molehills when you're going through this process. 

You can see that I was not creative at all with my food selections. I wish I could say that I was being positive at this point, but truthfully I got so sick of liquid food that I really just gave up. It is a perpetual cycle - you're starving, so you're miserable and lack all motivation to feed yourself, and then you're miserably hungry. I cried from hunger more than once. On liquids you really can't ever feel full. So, more advice: plan ahead if you can, and stay open to trying different things.  But be prepared for disappointments. One thing that really got to me was a pumpkin who up that a lovely coworker of the hubs made for me...I tried to eat it, but even though it was thoroughly puréed, the fibres from the pumpkin (no matter how small) all got stuck through my teeth and wires and it took me forever to pick/brush/rinse them all out. And then there's the picture above - my mom put spaghetti through the blender, but loaded it with cheese for calories. The same thing happened, but worse, with the cheese.

All of these frustrations are bad enough, but here's where it again differs from elective jaw surgery: because my teeth were all badly damaged, brushing and cleaning them is EXTREMELY painful. So knowingly getting them full of food debris to be painstakingly removed later? NO THANKS.