Working on my honorary doctorate...

It's wonderful having an engineer for a husband. No, really. My life is spreadsheetized and documented and let me tell you how much insurance we have! His need for knowledge and data is unwavering...and it's pushing me to really get to understand each recommendation and step from the doctors. 

I have been reading study after study on the treatment of bilateral condylar fractures, and let me tell you that I'm actually enjoying the learning. It's been a while since I've a. Read a scientific paper or study and b. Done anything biology related. It's just too bad about the circumstances. 

I am also thankful I have a degree in biology! I'd say half of the medical terms I can understand by past knowledge and the other half I have a good understanding of after looking up what they mean. Same with the anatomy.  It doesn't mean that I always understand what a procedure entails, and I definitely don't know how it relates to other structures, side effects and all that. But at least I am comfortable with it all. 

My research has interestingly backed up both of my oral surgeons claims (gee, surprise surprise, they know what they're talking about) despite the fact that it seems my care to this point has produced this undesired result. 

I'm pretty sure that I mentioned already that there really isn't a sure fire way to treat my injury. 

An interesting study I read last night backed that up to a T.  It seems that if you're going to operate on a bilateral condylar fracture to pin them together, you have to do it within the first 2-3 weeks.  After that, your jaw joints start to heal and compensate for the injury, and they won't stop until around 9 months later. That means to get a stable result after surgery, you have to either beat your body's repair mechanisms or wait until they're pretty much done, or at least stable. 

And when you do operate, they've found that it's pretty fruitless to try and get your jaw back into the sockets. The main goal at that point is to get your teeth to meet in a functional and therefore attractive way.  If that has to be done by shaving down some other, non-related part of your jaw, then so be it. 

In rare cases (ooh, I'm special) a TMJ replacement is required. Only when what they call ankylosis is happening, or fusing of your jaw joint that will eventually render it useless. Or if your bone is degenerating, although I suspect that these two are one and the same. 

So what I'm trying to do is figure out how they know that's really happening. I am still going for an MRI and more CT scans, so I am hoping, wishing and praying that these definitely confirm whether or not this is happening.  That, or I'm blissfully in denial that Dr P is sure of that already and I just need to hear one (or a few) more times.