A Different Kind of Rejection
Two weeks ago, I started feeling really bad — almost like a flu bug but not quite: I was run down, severely dizzy, couldn’t think straight, and my head hurt a lot. For a week I battled this until I found something in the back of my mouth: a little bump that hurt when I touched it. It reminded me of previous bumps and what they were — jaw infections — so naturally I freaked out. First, let me back up just a bit. When I was 15 (for those of you playing along at home, that would be twenty years ago), I had extensive jaw surgery to correct severe TMJ. In order to hold everything together while it healed, my surgeon put in 28 pieces of hardware: plates, wires, and screws. And unfortunately, as of right now, I’ve had two surgeries to remove the hardware from the left side of both jaws. Because they got infected and would have (most likely, not being dramatic here) killed me. And the infections were almost impossible to cure because they were both on the metal, not in tissue.