The good news!

After months of battling with my insurance company, while my surgeon's office only helped by intermittently offering encouragement to not give up (the other half of the time they were trying to convince me to do the surgery night finish fighting with the insurance later...) I switched to an in network surgeon who had a dedicated worker whose only job was to get my surgery approved. I started trying to get this approved back in August of 08 to no avail, and then once my new surgeon's office submitted the info, I received approval in 2 days. 2 DAYS! So I now have an official surgery date to look forward to: May 26th. Just a little over a month away, and I'm so excited.

Although I sort of went into shock after I got the good news (surgery finally approved) because instead of thinking solely of my distaste for insurance companies now I had no choice put to focus on the actual surgery actually happening. So I felt a little scared, and sort of like, wait why am I doing all of this again? But that stage didn't last for very long, I gave that decision a lot of thought long ago and I decided to do this so I am not backing out now! I just now that everything is going to go by so quickly...I have an adjustment at the ortho on Wednesday where I will get to tell Dr. G the great news! And then on May 11th, I have an appointment with the surgeon for sort of a pre surgery information session, well info for me and updated models for him to practice the surgery with...I will have to have an appointment set up to get the surgical hooks put on at the ortho and then before I know it, the big day will be here! Since the day before is Memorial Day and both my mom and I will be off of work, she will fly in the weekend before and we will get to have some fun time before I am essentially an invalid and all of her time is spent trying to find creative ways to satiate my hunger for food while only have a very tiny opening in my mouth in which to eat any. We are also going out of town in a few weekends for Adam's birthday so that will also help the weeks fly by!

I have had this surgery as a source of worry and stress for over a year now, and I am so excited to get it over with! My biggest concern is all of the weight I will lose in the weeks after the surgery by not being able to eat normally, but hopefully adding protein powder to pretty much everything will help and Adam will hopefully have some other ideas in that area as well to keep me healthy and the weight I do have from falling off! People are so rude and quick to point out how thin I am, so I dread hearing what they would have to say if I lose too much...and of course, for my own health, it would be a sign that I am not getting enough nutrition if I can't keep from losing weight so I just want to avoid that for many reasons! Once this is all over, I hope my enhanced chewing abilities will make it possible for me to maintain a higher/healthier weight but I will have to wait and see if that will happen.

I have tried to do a few blogs since getting my braces and haven't been able to keep up past a few posts, but I will try to do a better job with this one. I probably wouldn't have had the courage to go through with this had it not been for the many journals I read detailing the pre surgery optimism, the post surgery frustrations and depression and then the final entries where we find out that after the recovery, everyone always comes to the conclusion that it was all worth it.