Anyone in the mood for a trance song? lol

It is interesting that the Olympics is finishing up on the 24th. So right after I watch the men's marathon, I will have to endure a whole new experience of my own: a three hour operation.

I'm putting all the details I can recall here because I feel somewhat responsible of offering an explanation to you guys, as well as needing to reference at least some of the important transformations during my life.

What I'm going through is called an orthognathic surgery, and is done by an oral maxillofacial surgeon called Dr. Tocchio. Nice friendly guy. He planned this since I was 13 years old with my orthodontist, Dr. Nguyen. They usually have to collaborate because the orthodontists have to line up the teeth first before the oral maxillofacial surgeon can determine how much to move the jaw. 

Which brings me to the diagnosis and prognosis. What I have is called class III malocclusion, vernacularly known as an underbite. Mine is a special case where the right bone of my mandible grew at a faster rate than the left side, which causes half of my teeth to completely miss each other when I bite. A big gap between my teeth also does not serve my speech abilities well, and I am lucky to not have developed a lisp as of yet because the mandible grew out during teen years and not when I was a baby. This condition is most likely to be recessive genetic trait, as neither of my parents show these symptoms. (Didn't stop them from blaming me for this condition, though) So the surgery is serves both functional and aesthetic purposes.

The surgery procedures, as I said, takes around 3 hours at NYGH. Dr. Tocchio will sedate me with an anesthesiologist (thank god and science), and then start cutting into my gums from the inside of my mouth. He will start with the lower jaw by cutting each side of the mandible 3 times, and taking out a bone from each side, and then sliding the broken mandible to the appropriate position. To secure the broken jaw to place, he'll put in titanium plating and screws to hold the face together while the bones grow back. Then he will conduct another "controlled bone fracture" on my upper jaw. (A controlled bone fracture is when a piece of your bones is completely detached from the rest of the skeletal structure, but remains attached to soft tissue-applies to both of my jaws) He will shift the upper jaw a bit to line up with the rest of my face, and graft the two pieces he took from my lower jaw into the upper jaw. The titanium plating and screws follow. In other words, he will break both of my jaws before putting it together again with titanium. Lastly, he will have to line up my chin again because it got slanted during development, so that involves cutting into my gums below my bottom incisors, controlled bone fracture, realignment, securement, etc. 

He's very professional.

So then it'll be 2 hospital nights, a few days of liquid diet, and week of numbness. Hopefully the swelling comes down then. The 2 biggest risks are infections, and permanent numbness (only for useless face muscles, not the important motor ones), in that order. Nothing too serious. Hopefully, I'll regain speech function by mid-September, which is just in time for school. Too bad there's still braces after this, and I'll have to add elastics too to make my teeth and face muscles adjust to the new bite. So that elusive smile won't finish until...quite a while. Hopefully by this Christmas.

So yeah, that's basically what I'm been planning for this summer. Sadly, this had to take priority over a summer job. Oh well.

Just a neat music video I refound today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYbLR67_F9E