Day 6 - Ice Cream is the new Codeine

Day 6! OMGosh!

I can't believe it will be a week tomorrow. It's incredible how fast time goes when your hopped up on all sorts of drugs :) I have lots of good news from today, but let's start with the photos:

This smiling photo kind of scares me. I've been watching True Blood all week long and I kind of think I look like a vampire with the elastics showing. MUUUWAHAHAHA.

So today was very relaxing! I think it helped a lot with the swelling because my face is looking a lot less swollen! I took these photos on my Blackberry, so their quality isn't the greatest. I have a LOT of yellowish bruising on my lower cheeks and down my neck which you can't really tell from here.

Today I was also allowed to start drinking things other than clear liquids! AMAZING!!! I started this morning off with a Chocolate Boost with extra Protein. I'm not a huge fan of these meal replacement drinks, I think they have a lot of chemicals, sugar and processed foods in them that I don't think my body really likes right now... so I'm going to try to drink them as a last resort. For lunch I made a delicious smoothie (very watered down) with 1% milk, frozen mangos, cranberry juice and Vega (whole food health optimizer). Vega is a complete meal replacement that is high in fiber, protein, and essential fatty acids. It's also free from animal products, dairy, gluten, soy, sugar, wheat, yeast, artificial sweeteners, GMOs and pesticides. I'm going to try to use Vega everyday and it should be able to give me a lot of the vitamins and minerals I am missing from eating normal foods. I cannot claim that it tastes very good though... For dinner, I had more of the shake I made for lunch and some delicious Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream for dessert! YUM.

This afternoon I decided to stop taking the codeine (I took one portion in the morning when I woke up). So I'm just on Extra Strength Tylenol now! I haven't felt any pain all day, so it must mean that I don't need to codeine any longer.

As I mentioned before, today was relaxing - the only visitor I had was my brother this morning who came and brought me a marvelous squishy neck pillow. I tried it out when I napped this afternoon and it was SUPERB at keeping my head up! Having only one visitor helped for my resting (not for fun though) and I lay around and napped all day. It felt so good to not talk and let my mouth rest! To get some goodness back into my stressed out skin I made a blueberry/yogurt/honey face mask and sat in the sun for a while with it on. Now my skin feels so moisturized and very smooth! Later in the evening I took a 30 minute walk to get some fresh air. My energy level has been awesome and that didn't tire me out at all.

To help with the swelling and get the blood flow moving around (to bring down bruising) I was applying warm compresses all day again and massaging my face in circles. Seems to be working from what I can tell and it felt good.

I also started moving my mouth around in weird ways to try to get the muscles moving again. I think my doctor is going to show me some range of motion exercises that I will be started at my appointment tomorrow. I can now open my mouth a little more than a finger breadth (not much from yesterday.

I took a long look in my mouth today and I can see all of the stitches - its kind of cool! I had to put wax on my upper front teeth because the surgical wire prong thing has been jabbing into the inside of my upper lip. When I did that I also noticed that my upper jaw/gum area is totally numb - SO WEIRD and crazy that I didn't realise this before.

My nose has been drippy - I'm not sure that I've mentioned that yet. Sometimes it still has a slight blood residue when I wipe it, but otherwise its clear. I've been using the saline nasal spray, so it could be from that - extra moisturized!

Weight - I'm down 5 lbs now. I think that since I'm on the smoothie train as of today, I will probably not lose any more weight.

As you already may know, tomorrow is my ONE WEEK POST-OP ANNIVERSARY! Such a great milestone! I have my Dr appointment at 1:30 and I'm hoping he says everything is healing superbly. I'm also hoping that he can send me the x-rays from before and after and I'll for sure post them if he does.

Have a great night everyone!

Alexis

P.s. Yesterday I had approx. 100 people view my blog in one day! Thank you so much for everyone who has been following me and supporting my adventure. It feels great to have so much support.