Eileen Mitchell

I was practically salivating, giddy with glee over the thought of six glorious, delicious, decadent weeks all to myself. Whatever would I do with all this time? Never once did it occur to me that I might actually need to, uh... recuperate. But it didn’t take long for me to learn otherwise. You see, from my naive viewpoint, jaw surgery was like playing with LEGO® toys. I imagined the brilliant Dr. Hottie unhinging my upper and lower jaws, gently sliding them into their proper position, tweaking my chin, snapping everything back into place and voila, problem fixed!

I now suspect my scheming shyster of a surgeon, who has since been rechristened Dr. Pol Pot Beelzebub, took the lazy way out and simply smashed my face with a sledgehammer. The better to make his scheduled tee-time, I’m thinking.

Oh sure, I knew I’d be a little puffy, but I wasn’t expecting my distorted black and blue mug to look like a ten-pound butternut squash. At least that’s what it appeared to resemble, since I couldn’t see much of anything, thanks to the glacier-like ice pack that swaddled my entire swollen face.

Every time I moved, blood gushed from the nostril where the breathing tube had been inserted and my entire head felt like one massive, rotting, throbbing toothache. My jaws were wired shut, rendering it difficult to breathe and challenging to consume my liquids — only diet. And the coup de grace? My entire face, from the nose down, was completely dead-as-a-doornail numb.