The days were just dragging by and I was trying desperately to sleep as best I could,
BUT. THE. CONGESTION.
Congestion is by far the worst part of the whole recovery. I cannot breathe through my mouth at all, which mind you, is how I've been breathing primarily for the past nineteen years. So the nose is all I got. They opened my nose up with surgery so that I can breathe better, but it's been so stuffy that all of my energy has been focused on trying to breathe. The one thing I can do that provides immediate relief in use Afrin nasal spray. It unswells the blood vessels in your nose that are causing congestion. Unfortunately, you're only allowed to use it every 10-12 hours. So when that wears off, some of the other things you can try are:
- taking a steamy shower
- using a vaporizer/humidifier
- saline nasal spray (every 20 minutes)
- trying to gently blow out some of the mucus (you're not really supposed to blow your nose for about 2 weeks)
It's also really frustrating not being able to spit out the mucus in my throat. You can't really "hock" properly when you're mouth is all banded shut, so you just have to swallow it.
As you can see I have this fun chin strap thing on, whose purpose is to help reattach the muscles in my chin that were disconnected from the bone for the genioplasty. I also have two little stitches on the underside of either side of my lower jaw, where they had to make two tiny incisions to stick a little screw driver in there.
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