By Lisa Ansay —
Pain is still an issue. He has jaw pain and commonly has an icepack nearby. This is to be expected, as surgeons rotated the right cheekbone downward and inward, and replaced all the “large and heavy” plating with thinner titanium plates with “lots and lots” of screws, as described by Dr. Joganic. The left side – lower jaw – was not actually re-broken to re-align. They used a saw. :0( Yikes. Yet that side doesn’t seem to bother him so much.
Dr. Joganic also explained with all the mid-face tweaks of the bony structure, headaches are to be expected. Tylenol is covering the pain most of the time, but the heavier stuff is standing by.
The next step is orthodontics. He will be getting braces in the next few weeks to create “better arches” in the upper and lower rows of teeth. Even though Taylor had straight, well aligned teeth prior to the accident, and only missing one tooth, teeth have “drifted” since his jaw was so misaligned. “It won’t take long” to bring them back into well-formed arches, and from there Dr. Joganic plans more surgery.
Path-forward: Braces, then another jaw surgery for proper bite – sounds like he wants to move the bottom jaw forward a bit. Then the eye orbits (minor re-shaping) but Dr. Joganic is leery to work too much around the eye-sockets, as that’s where the last CSF leak repair-work lives. Next will be soft-tissue grafts around the eyes, temples and work on the nose.
All therapies have been ordered including speech, occupational, physical, cognitive, etc. And he can also start going to the super-awesome health club facility nearby called SPOFIT – Disability Empowerment Center. This is a super-cool state-of-the-art facility for any kind of disability, and has everything from martial arts to rock-climbing to tri-athelon events, etc. This place is pretty impressive.
Physicians did not want to release him to start any outpatient therapies or SPOFIT until after the initial reconstruction. Not sure why.
Taylor’s speech was already quite good, but now with the surgical changes in his mouth structure, the volume of his voice and the ease of his swallow is pretty exciting. It is so awesome to see how thrilled he is with what he can do now.
The El Encanto Fitness and Holistic Rehabilitation Center (a.k.a. the house we live in) has been filled with friends and family these past few weeks, and it has been awesome. The weather has been an amazing 85F so much time is being spent outside, soaking up the sun.
