What's going on with my jaw?
At night I insert the lovely (NOT) bite guard to give my jaws and teeth a rest, but I have noticed on days that I talk a lot or stress my jaws out with slightly too big food, I have to do a little more maneuvering to get it to fit. It seems my jaws offset themselves when things get tired…and it feels really weird. When I wake up in the mornings it is so painful…I wonder if I should be doing something more during the day…should I put the pachooey chomp thing in earlier? or between movies? I will have to remember to ask Dr. Li on Thursday.
I am gaining weight and it’s sucking. So I made another cake.
Yeah.
This diet isn’t working.
February 7th, 2007 at 8:57 am
I can not overstate the importance of taking the recovery process slowly. Heat, massage, and no real chewing! I’m up to the ability to softly chew a bannana and it’s 8 weeks to the day. Also, Ibuprofen or other good anti-inflammatories are your friends (just not all at once..). My lightning-bolt shock of pain are mildly back, in a much more timid form, since I have begun to stretch the muscles of my jaw (the popsicle-stick ordeal). I live off of warm compress and Ibuprofen topped off with a little gentle massage up and down the molar regions. Good luck, I hope that you fair well. Try the forum and see If others have the experience to help you through to a solution that works for you. Also, IF your doctor thinks that you may be having the dreaded trigeminal neuralgia (triggered by all of the swelling and trauma) -or, perhaps even just plain old never-really-hurt-so-good neuropathy, then there are medicines which do help to lessen the severity of the lightning-bolt-like pains. I take Neurontin for TN and the pain lasts for a couple-few seconds, but, it is so much less intense. And yes, I understand the fear. After it is over, it seems silly to have screamed, but at the time, it is a necessary release, isn’t it? I take comfort in knowing that it is only pain, and there’s nothing really “wrong.”
February 8th, 2007 at 8:02 am
I remember a few things now – Since spint removal, my teeth don’t meet. It’s slowly getting better, but I now tend to clench my jaw as I go to sleep and this causes much soreness in the following day. As one may expect, when I make conscious effort not to clench, less soreness occurs. Also, as I started sleeping on my side(after the MMA), I would support my cranium (with pillow/arm/combination thereof) and let my face/jaw hang somewhat. This I slowly forgot, so, I’d sleep with my jaw crammed into the pillow and the whole face would be sore the next day. This is pretty stinky. Once again, I try to remember to let jaw have it’s own way with gravity at night. Also, a little caffiene is OK but -too much- and whenever the painful but all-too brief (rotf/LOL) flashes of nerve-rend-asunder-ing mind-altering scream-inducing goodness tend to creep back into my life they gain a new, caffienated-speedfreak type of additional vigor. In my case, the Trigeminal Neuralgia (capitalized to show a deep, well-earned respect) has always been agravated by excess caffiene and will hurt more and more times in an hour. Pet the cats and get some rest. You’ll need it for whenever you head back to work. Speaking of which, I need to get back into the lab and crunch some data left over from yesterday’s experiments.