So I haven’t been able to eat… not for any fun reason, just because the plate in my mouth they gave me to seal off my open face stops my remaining teeth from meeting. Fun, right?

I moved onto soft solids because… well… you can’t keep a good Jen down (or a cheeky one). So I got into scrambled eggs and crust-less quiche, throwing in the inside of a baked potato here and there. But then my jaw started aching and my mouth started hurting. I remembered that this happened last time I had my jaw taken away too (that’s a ridiculous statement, isn’t it). I mean… last time around it was also reconstructed, but once I started moving up to soft solids I had to sometimes move back to liquids.

Wild, isn’t.

So thanks to the pain, I moved back to liquids but GUESS WHAT?! After 4pm, liquids started to travel into my nose. As in… I’d take a sip and then it would end up on the other side and run down the back of my nose into my throat. And then one day I moved my head backwards and my ear seemed to fill with tea.

I didn’t like that very much…

I wondered how I was supposed to keep surviving. Until I got a call from Deepti on New Year’s Eve.
‘We want to get you in on Monday’ she said, ‘will that work for you?’
‘Love of my life, you could not have uttered greater words…’
I’m sure I was more chill than that. ‘oh yeah sure, why not…’
I think the reality was somewhere between the two.

But either way, it was a relief.

The registrar had told me there was no chance of getting me in, due to Covid and all hospital beds being full. This also worried me because they had told me that the antiseptic packing in my cheek needed to be changed every month… But alas! No need to worry for long.

So tomorrow I am back in for a day surgery, though as I live on my own, I think I’ll be in over night. I’m looking forward to catching up with my friend, A, who is unfortunately still in there… It’ll just be relatively low key, I think. Clean it all out, change the packing in my cheek, and I hope they will be able to adjust the plate in my mouth so that liquid doesn’t end up on the other side, and hopefully, so I’ll be able to eat a bit more.

I am unsure when I’ll actually be able to get my reconstruction done, but I’m hoping I won’t be waiting forever…