Thursday, April 02, 2009

Busy few weeks

Some of my readers know what's been going on in my life the last few weeks, but I decided to fill the world in on it. About two weeks ago, my son had orthognathic surgery. Basically, that's surgery to change the bone structure of the jaw (see here for Wikipedia article). The surgery happened during his spring break.

We've been anticipating this for several years, you have to wait until the patient (my son in this case) is past most of the growth spurts. I've been working directly with insurance companies for at least 5 years to review the estimated costs and coverage. Needless to say, this has been an experience.

The surgery went well and lasted about 3 hours. We spent the night in the hospital and came home the following day. Of course having major jaw surgery, chewing was not an option, so he mainly had juices, soup, and lots of pudding for several days. There was lots of swelling, but this went down in about a week. At the end of the week he went back to school.

This week on Monday, I got a call from the oral surgeon. He asked that I come in, that day, to review the x-rays. It doesn't take a lot of prognostication to figure out that this isn't a good request. So, I went in that afternoon and looked at x-rays. The doctor said he wasn't happy with the "fixation" (the way the bones lined up) that he was getting. He wanted to go back in and fix this.

So Wednesday, we went back into the hospital to fix the fixation. This was a quicker procedure, about 45 minutes. By 11am, we were back home. Today, he's back at school. Still in some pain, still some swelling, but doing better. We'll have new x-rays next Monday, hopefully the fixation is ok.

Next week, I'm going on vacation. I'll probably take my laptop, but I don't think I'm going to blog. I need a week off.

For those of the praying type, please pray for my family. It's been a rough couple of weeks. Pray for healing and insight.

Thanks.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the update, Randy. I prayed for all of you. Enjoy your week off - you deserve it!

Steve: The Lightning Man said...

I'll keep you guys in my thoughts. Take care, brother!

Brooke said...

Good luck to you and your son, Randy.

Lots of luv. :)

DJ Black Adam said...

I pray for a swift healing for your son! (In JESUS mighty name of course :-)

Randy said...

Thanks for the prayers and thoughts... My son is doing very well after his surgery. The doctor even called me on vacation to tell me that the xrays looked very good. That was a call I didn't mind taking on vacation.