a month is too long to wait... (44 weeks/10 months)

i called dr. hobday's office last week and asked if dr. hobday could call me and let me know what is up with my molds once he gets to look at them. he called back a day or two later, and is much more personable on the phone. it was great, he said that my molds look good. new plan is to do a 2-piece lefort instead of a 3 piece. it will mean better healing for me, and also less risk to my teeth as they are only cutting between 2 teeth instead of 4. sounds good to me, if it works that's cool. he did say that i will then have my coils/springs moved to between my two front teeth, and i will have a space between my two front teeth before and after surgery. ick. :( but it's only a mm. ONE MILLIMETER? that's almost nothing. so i guess that's ok. he said he sees this taking 2-3 months (i'm assuming he means from my next appt date, which is april 1). and that he sees surgery being during 'summertime' and that i should have my braces off by the end of the year. of course, depending on how things move, etc. (always an asterisk at the end of his sentence). well, 2-3 months that's june 1 - july 1st. that's soon! but that's good, the sooner the better. (gah, scary!) his big concern was that he hasn't heard from dr. keane.

so, once off the phone with him i called dr. keane's office to get things going. told her the news of the change in surgery, and they said come on in!

so I went in for a consult with OS dr. keane. I wasn't too sure of him after last time, I thought he was nice enough but he made me nervous doing my surgery. But then we chatted for a good 1/2 hour, and now I like him a lot. I impressed him too! He was like, 'wow, so you have been researching this, huh? You know more than I do!'

hey, what can I say, the internet has a lot of info out there and the yahoo orthognathic surgery groups are full of great info.
He and my ortho now say that I should have surgery sometime this 'summertime', possibly july or august* (always with the asterisk of, provided your teeth move correctly, no problems come up, we don't change our mind about things, and the moon aligns with the 3rd star past jupiter, etc). So that will be a blast. They have changed their minds and now think that I'll only need a 2 piece leforte, not a 3 piece. Which is better because my upper jaw will only be in 2 pieces and that will heal better/faster than 3 pieces and be less complicated. Both dr. hobday and dr. keane are really excited about this, it’s one less cut, easier healing, etc. Which is great, yes it is. At the same time, my upper jaw is still being cut into 2 pieces! 2 or 3, it doesn’t much matter! Dr. keane also dropped a bombshell on me that he thinks I 'might' need lower jaw surgery too. But we'll see once I'm about a month out from surgery and they have my surgery molds done. So that sucks. A lot. But I processed it for a minute and then started firing new questions at him. He was very impressed with my knowledge of all this. Of which, I feel like I don't know much at all. Gah!

Some time in 2005, maybe? (43 weeks/10 months...)

had my big progress mold appt last friday, YEA! was very odd though, the ortho lady just plunked the mold into my mouth without taking out my wires or powerchains. so when she took it out my wires pretty much obliterated my molds, at least that's how it looked to me, both looking at the mold and picking the impression material out from between my teeth. my ortho looked at them though and said they were good, so i guess that's ok? whatever works for him i guess. i got my powerchains changed thank goodness, i was sick of pink and pink. i got a nice lavender on top now and bright teal on the bottom! the ortho had me make an appt 3 weeks out for a 'long adjustment' as he doesn't know what he'll need to do until he looks at my molds. of course, i couldn't get in for 4 weeks and my choices were 10:40 and 1:00... uh huh... so then, I picked 1:00 and will be taking a half day off of work. what a joke. gah! oh well, it's a friday so getting out early will be good. one thing that is annoying with this is that i get to go 4 more weeks without knowing ANYTHING about my surgery, what he needs to do to get me 'ready' and/or how much longer it will be. ugh! i feel like i can't plan my life, and now i wait another 4 weeks to hear anything at all! maybe my teeth will be perfect and ready to go? maybe? dr. hobday obviously is not in that camp as i have this appt set up. he was saying we might do some rebonding, etc. ugh. if he moves brackets then i start all over again with the flexy wires! :P that's ok. i didn't want to have kids before i was 40 anyway...

one thing i'm concerned about is that i have some gum regression on my bottom right, between teeth 2 & 3. i first noticed it a week ago friday. it was sore and red and SHRINKING. i called my ortho and they said that he would look at it on friday. he did, didn't seem too concerned, said that i had some before, maybe something irritated it. i have been careful to brush it well and thoroughly yet carefully at the same time. looking today though now i see that if you look at my two bottom middle teeth, the one on my right has a lower gumline than the left. gah!!! great, one more thing to worry about with all this.