Metal Mouth Message Board

Hello!
I haven't posted here in such a long time!!
I'll try to keep it short...

I'm a year in braces and six days ago i had my lower jaw advancement!!

So far things have been pretty easy for me. I could leave the hospital 24 hours after the surgery (I begged the doctor to let me go, because the other people in my room made me feel much worse than my own pain).
I had hardly any pain and i feel pretty fit.

The swelling was huge, especially day three, but i was prepared for that. It has been going down since day four and today i actually recognise 'me' again;)

My upper and lower front teeth meet like they should and that's AMAZING!

But i do have a question about my molars..they don't meet at all, so there's no way i could chew something (but ok, i probably shouldn't do that anyway!).
But is that normal? i thought that the ortho prepares your teeth to meet after surgery...so why don't they now? And if the molars will only meet after more ortho work..it might take six months before i can chew again?

I had the same problem - there was a 5mm gap between my molars post-surgery. This has been closed down with elastics over 5-6 months - not entirely, but mostly. I think it's quite common, in people who had a deep overbite corrected.

yes BSSO!

i'm glad to hear it's 'normal'

my surgeon told me there is still some ortho work needed (but i knew that, normally about six months more after surgery) because now i have a bit of a cross bite at one side, but he didn't mention the molars, so i'll ask him on wednesday.

This is an interesting topic to me, because it's an issue I'm dealing with this time around with my LeFort I (second time around, after a non-union the first time). The first time, after my LeFort I, I had no posterior open bite on the right, and a slight one on the left. This time, I'm open posteriorly on both sides (about 2-3mm, not too much). My surgeon warned me that this would be the case, but that the orthodontist would close it down with elastics postoperatively.

Why my surgeon chose to position the maxillary segment this way still puzzles me, but I think it was probably a combination of two things: 1) an attempt to "deepen" my very shallow anterior bite just a little; 2) this was the best position to place the segment with the smallest gaps between superior and inferior segments. If it meant better healing, I'm willing to suffer through a little more time in braces and elastics!

If it makes you feel better know that only three of my teeth touch right now and I'm 6 weeks post op. I can chew soft foods very slowly with my molars. It's more slow because I keep bitting my cheecks. I'm going to have to get crowns to get my molars to touch eventually. But know that you will be able to chew. And it is a gloroius thing.

acrobat,
Hi there, just had to respond to your post, even if it is a little late. I had a BSSO right at 4 months ago now, and I have the EXACT same scenario as you. Back molars do not exactly meet anymore, (3-4 mm gap on the inside it feels like) and also about a 2 mm crossbite since the surgery. it's hard to get used to the back molars not meeting, but you learn to make do untill they move the molars, and it gets better. My crossbite got worse as time progressed from the surgery, but I've been in this superheavy elastics triangle configuration on my right side and it's almost corrected it completely in about 3 weeks. So don't worry about that. I "think" and I may be wrong here, but molars are one of the last thing they start working on before they take your braces off, is that right? It was like they set up the arches to line up correctly, and now all they have to do is some tweaking and start working on those molars. It's like after the surgery, since things are lines up correctly, you really can see the problem now with the Curve of Spee that just wasn't obvious before since the teeth weren't lining up correctly.

I wish I had the same experience as all of you. Mine were way open because I kind of fought my elastics as I wanted my front teeth to meet properly, but it turns out they wanted to leave me with an overbite (much smaller than originally though) as my back teeth do meet when I allowed my jaw to move back slightly. I thought the surgeon wouldn't be happy when he saw this at check up but he was very happy. I am happy but I din't realise I would still have a slight overbite afterwards, especially as my jaw was happy with a position where my front teeth met perfectly.

I actually remember them saying my bottom teeth would still be behind my front beforehand so I'd say it's not the same for you.