Adventures in Dallas

I'm prompted to bring this neglected blog up to date because Nancy's recent email to family and friends about her TMJ surgery in Dallas failed to deliver the pictures.  So here's the email we tried to send.

Hard to believe it's been a week out of surgery. Want to show you our room in the hospital. My thoughts were so positive on day of surgery. The trust I have in Dr. Wolford is so great. His fellow is good too; he was a surgeon already but wanted to learn newer stuff from the master.  In Recovery the night after surgery I shared a nurse with only one other person. Didn't even have to say anything, I would raise my hand with a syringe and more water would come. I drink so much water I started to drive them crazy so they doubled my syringe. It was really cool. I didn't have to worry about having to go to the bathroom. Peter's work started early Thursday; it takes forever to get all the medications into me.

Check out the room Dr. Wolford's  patients get. The picture was taken from my bed to the adjacent sitting room.  Drinking from a syringe is routine because I can't open my mouth very much, but I'm not wired shut.  They gave me Boost and baby food.  If anyone needs baby food we have half a case.  Now I know why Kathryn wants to eat real food.

 

The operation was complicated, took 8 hours.  In addition to Dr. Wolford and his fellow, Dr. Walsh (my orthodontist from Key Largo) was there to observe. They replaced my right jaw joint with an implant, very easy to see in the x-rays.  They also moved both my upper and lower jaws forward and widened my mouth with bone spacers.  There's a plastic splint in my mouth to keep everything in place.  That will be removed by cutting a couple of wires.  Now my tongue isn't too big for my mouth any more, and my airway is much bigger so I don't have to keep my nose in the air to breathe.  (Russell, the TMJ is my JAW, not my knee.  I can still kick Peter around, I just can't chew him out.)



They kept me in the hospital an extra night. Hard to leave a room like that. They didn't want me to catch any of the "nasty hospital bugs" so they talked us into leaving on Saturday. No one was coming in so it was a slow pace to leave.  Here is the wonderful "hotel" room we have now for the next two weeks, it's about 12 x 18.  We think of it as boating.  It's more room than we had in the sailboat.  That's why we got a trawler.  The recliner is my bed.