Tuesday, April 9, 2013

The Tale of FrankenMouth

I think most bad news can be softened by adding an emphatic "SURPRISE!" before it. Like "SURPRISE! Your eBay item didn't sell" or "SURPRISE! I lost your sock" or "SURPRISE! You need a gum graft." Adding that interjection doesn't make the news any less true, and it could potentially soften the blow. Sadly, the news of my gum recession was not broken to me in such a fun manner, and it appeared that I would, in fact, require a gum (gingival) graft. It's now 2 months after the procedure, and I feel pretty good about calling it a success and discussing it. For the tooth-phobic among us, this post will be sans pictures.

The general procedure of the gum graft is that They (your friendly neighborhood periodontist) chop some tissue out of your upper palate and graft it onto your lower gumline (or wherever your recession is), the idea being that the palate tissue is stronger than the thin gums and will hold recession at bay for the rest of your lifetime, reducing the chances of disease and rot by preventing your teeth's roots from being exposed. In practice, the surgery entails a fully numb mouth, some scraping, some blood, some random tools, and a whole lot of stitches. I'm honestly not exactly sure what went on because even though I opted out of being put under, I mostly kept my eyes closed the whole time.

Because my mouth is on the small side, the doc couldn't get a long enough piece of tissue from just one side of my palate to graft across 6 of my bottom teeth, so he had to take tissue and stitch up BOTH sides of my palate. I had been under the impression that the donor site would be in the middle of my palate, but it actually came from just alongside my teeth, which ultimately is probably a good thing. As it turned out, double the donor sites equaled about four times a worse recovery, or so I like to think.

As with many surgeries, the recovery was the worst part about this surgery. Even though the mouth is supposedly one of the quickest areas on the body to heal, it took me several weeks to feel completely back to normal. My follow-up routine involved salt water gargling multiple times a day, mouthwashing twice a day, and light toothbrushing starting 3 days after surgery. It took me a full month before I was brave enough to eat anything more solid than soups, milk or juice with protein powder, and soft items that could be chewed along my back molars. I was given 3 prescriptions beforehand: 600mg Ibuprofen (for mild pain and inflammation), narcotic Meperidine (for strong pain), and anti-nausea drug Phenergan (for nausea caused by the Meperidine). I didn't even bother getting the Meperidine and Phenergan and used the Ibuprofen on and off for the first week after the surgery. In my case, a blood clotting medication probably would have been more helpful.

I had a hard time getting the bleeding to stop on the day of the surgery; I left the perio's office with my mouth stuffed full of gauze and arrived home 10 minutes later just in time to spit up a mouthful of blood. I spent the rest of the evening sitting on my couch pressing tea bags against the graft site, though in retrospect, it's possible some of the bleeding was from the donor sites as well. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be the only day I dealt with bleeding problems. I ended up throwing several clots over the course of the first few days, where one minute I was fine and the next minute I was gushing. The pinnacle of that breakthrough bleeding came at a party where I was savoring some tasty cake and ice cream, only to realize that my spoon was now coated in red instead of strawberry pink.

Flash forward 2 months. I went in for my final check yesterday, and it has supposedly healed up quite nicely. I'm eating solid foods, my donor sites have healed with nary a scar, and my graft site is hardly even sensitive anymore. However, I will always have a strip of lighter colored gum on my bottom jaw: despite being billed by insurance as a cosmetic surgery, the donor tissue will never change color and darken to match the gumline, so I will forever visibly remain: FrankenMouth.