I scratched my chin today...

...and felt it! For the first time since the surgery, I'm starting to get sensation back in the left side of my chin. This is the last area of my face to regain feeling, and while it's not 100% back to normal, it's encouraging. Other areas (mostly my lips) still tingle to the touch. As for the inside of my mouth, the roof is slowly getting better and my bottom gums have spots of sensation—some areas I can feel, others I can't—but my top gums are still completely numb. I'll let you know if those nerves ever decide to wake up.

At the very beginning of my recovery, I would constantly panic about whether I would regain feeling in the areas that had gone numb, which at the time was most of my face. I did some research and read somewhere that 70% of those who undergo orthognathic surgery get full feeling back, while 30% are left with complete or partial numbness. I used to feel dejectedly as if I'd fall into the 30%, but as time goes on I have hope that I'll join the 70%. So if you're in the early phases of recuperation and find yourself feeling discouraged too, remember that the odds are "ever in your favor" and the majority of us will have full feeling once again. Someday you too might scratch your chin and feel it.

100 Days!

It's hard to believe that this is what I looked like 100 days ago... Pretty horrifying, if you ask me. But then again...pretty amazing. I'm so thankful for how quickly we can recover from things like this. How wonderful our Creator is to have designed such incredible bodies capable of healing themselves. And while my body is still working at healing itself, and although it's slow-going, I'm grateful for small signs of progress. For example, I'm beginning to get feeling in the roof of my mouth again! And the incision lines/scar tissue hurt less than the last time I posted! I saw my surgeon today, and all is well!

But actually, all is more than well. All is fantastic. Great things have been happening and exciting adventures are ahead. We've started celebrating wedding season, with two showers down, one to go, and a bachelorette party in the works—woo hoo! Nathan graduated from college and is off in Oregon for the month of June, earning some honeymoon money. I was recently offered a job in Colorado—an absolute dream job, in fact. First item in the job description: spending a week in Hong Kong (I'll be going at the end of this month)! And before I know it I'll be getting hitched to the man of my dreams, honeymooning in the tropical paradise known as Hawaii, and moving to a new state to start my new life with said dream man. I. Am. Blessed. (Oh, and somewhere in there I'll be getting the braces off, maybe forever, but maybe not).

It just goes to show how much can happen in 100 days. A ton of healing and all sorts of amazing stuff. I'm so happy to have the jaw surgery behind me and to have so much now ahead of me. Life post-op is good. Maybe not 10 days out, or even 20. But eventually. And I hope that that can be an encouragement to any of you who are about to have or have just had this surgery, or one like it. 100 days might sound like a lifetime in the moment, but before you know it, it will be a thing of the past, and you'll be able to look toward your future without the all of the obstacles that open/under/over/cross bites bring. And that's a pretty wonderful future to have.