ONE WEEK!

This time next week my surgery will be OVER! I will probably be laying in the hospital bed feeling really good (some from relief but mainly from the meds I'll be on). Of course I am counting on the hardest part of the whole process being the recovery, so I really won't be out of the woods for awhile after the actual procedure is over, but it would be nice to at least get that part over with. I wonder how soon I will be able to get an idea of how the finished result will look...probably a few weeks. It's hard to imagine a time when I won't have all of this stuff hanging over me but I bet it will go pretty quickly from here.

The fact that I've been able to focus a lot of stress on the house situation has really helped keep me from freaking out too much about the surgery. We are supposed to close on the house tomorrow but the loan company needs Adam's employer to submit the employment verification form before they can finalize the loan paperwork. I hope his company realizes how important it is for them to fill that out quickly...I try to remind myself that I should let it go and not worry about it, but there is a really short time frame for us to close, move and be situated before my surgery so I have this knot in my stomach that won't go away. During my sister's wedding it loosened up quite a bit while we dancing to Ice Ice Baby and the YMCA, but only to tighten back up once I was back at work Monday. Hopefully by this time tomorrow, I will have a better picture on what is going to happen with the house so I can stop thinking about it.

I do have to say that as much as I stressed about Shelly's wedding going perfectly, it really did in the end I think. It was a lot of hard work, but I had a lot of fun at the reception dancing and mingling, and of course eating delicious wedding cake. It's a good thing I didn't do the surgery right before her wedding or I wouldn't have enjoyed myself half as much.

I have all of my final pre surgery appointments Thursday: Ortho at 9:30, then the surgeon at 11 and finally the hospital at 12:30. The ortho is putting on my surgical hooks, which should be a fun experience (sarcastic) and then the surgeon is going to go over all of the instructions for before and after the surgery, and do a physical...The hospital is just doing some routine bloodwork. I got to go back to the surgeon today because the upper impressions they did were a little messed up so they needed better ones. For some reason it has been hurting really badly when they are pulling the mold out, and I think it's from when Franklin actually knocked my teeth together =(.

So I think I'm in the home stretch! Just a little more to go...

Just waiting...

Well there is nothing new really regarding my surgery, but I figured I'd go ahead and write about what I have coming up...First of all, besides just dealing with the stress of having the surgery (preparing to leave work for a few weeks, planning my post surgery diet, etc) we are in the process of buying our first home. It's not the same house I talked about in the last post...we lost that one because they went with the other buyers (although my realtor said the deal later fell through and the seller's realtor came crawling back to see if we were still interested). However, the house that we have a contract on is one I found shortly after losing out on the other one...it's a foreclosure so we are getting it at an AMAZING price and it only had one owner and he took really good care of the house. I am trying to remind myself that something could still go wrong, mainly because we were pre approved but we still have to get the loan actually approved now...if the loan is approved, then I will get really excited!

I already started packing up our apartment because we won't have much time to move into the house before my surgery date. So far I've already gotten quite a bit ready to go. Since we close on a Wednesday, the plan is to start moving anything that will fit in our cars in the evenings after work until the weekend, also trying to sort of organize and unpack each load as we go...then on Saturday night we will get a UHaul and enlist some help to move all the big stuff, and whatever small stuff is left. This will leave me 2 full days to get the house in livable condition...which would be hard, except my mom flies in from Houston on Saturday so she will be able to help!

In regards to the surgery, I have an appointment this coming Monday with my surgeon. They will take new molds and xrays and discuss all the instructions for the surgery and aftercare. I am super excited because I have a lot of questions! After this appointment, I don't think I'll see the surgeon again until the day of surgery!! I have to have blood work and a physical done before the surgery, but I think that is going to be done at the hospital, so I don't think he will be involved. Very exciting to think that I'll only see him once more before surgery! I only have one ortho appointment before the big day, and that is to get hooks on...which I will have throughout moving weekend...yay...

That's all the big news for now...Just excited that things are SOO close to happening now, the wedding will be here in just over a week (which I can barely comprehend) and I just think the time is going to fly by...If you are reading this Jae, congrats again to you and Aaron for your first home purchase as well! What are the odds we would be going through this at the exact same time!?

A new jaw and a new house?

I have so many big things going on right now, it's hard to feel too much stress about any one given thing. The big list is: my surgery, trying to buy a house, Shelly's upcoming wedding and then Adam's birthday weekend. Of course the wedding and Adam's birthday aren't super stressful things to think about, but they do require some planning...We put an offer in on a home that we LOVE. It's got a wonderful back yard that is pretty much the largest we can expect in the area we are planning to move to and a spacious back covered porch. Adam and I are both looking so forward to spending a lot of time outdoors with the puppy (near future, hopefully puppies plural). We will want everyone to come visit us and will probably be eating a lot more BBQ!

They countered our offer pretty quickly and the request they came back with was kind of crazy so we met them half way. Adam and I are still anxiously waiting to hear something back about our counter offer back to them, and this is where I have to really try to relax and trust that things will work out for the best. It's hard to imagine finding another home that we would like as much as this one, but the reality of it is that their are a lot of other houses if this one doesn't work out.

I had an adjustment at the ortho today, probably the last one before my surgery. I have to go back for a visit the Thurs before surgery so they can do some molds and put the surgical hooks on each bracket. Some of my brackets already have a little hook built onto them for rubber bands but most don't, so they have to make hooks on all of them before surgery so that I can use rubber bands on every tooth afterwards. I am guessing from everything I've read that they will be a pain to deal with for the days in between getting them on and then going into surgery. Oh well, at least I got the OK from Dr. G regarding my surgery date. I figured if the surgeon said I was ready then that was good enough, but I was still a little nervous about what Dr. G would say. The assistant said that Dr. G bent my top wire a certain way to where it pulled one of my front teeth down too low and so they had to push it back up again =( That tooth really didn't want to go into the wire so it was pretty painful at the appointment, but thankfully my teeth aren't really sore at all right now. Each adjustment had started hurting less and less but the one before this one, my teeth were REALLY sore so it kind of threw me off. I guess in hindsight it's because they were pulling one of my teeth down...

I'm keeping my fingers crossed on the house and now it's probably time to file my taxes...I know I know, I waited until the last minute, but I did this on purpose because of the home buyers tax credit...I am just submitting an extension to give us more time to secure a house and get the credit =D.

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.