5 Days til SARPE

Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2006 11:42 am Post subject:

Ok...I'm starting to get a little nervous about this. I"m trying hard to keep the overall pre-surgery "FREAK OUT" at bay, but I can feel the anxiety starting to creep in a bit.

Spacers are doing fine, I can hardly feel them at all now. They did aggravate my lower teeth a bit yesterday but today they are much better. Tuesday morning they will come out and I will have the RPE (Rapid Palate Expansion) appliance put in temporary until Friday. It will not be permanently cemented. My oral surgeon says he needs to have it out during the surgery, and that when he is done he will put it back in, turn it a couple of times to make sure everything is working, then cement it in permanently himself.

I have to go talk with my Oral Surgeon tomorrow anyway. I use a dental sleep appliance for my sleep apnea. Basically it pulls my jaw into a forward position and holds it there by anchoring it against my front teeth and upper arch. My ortho ground it down a bit so it would fit better over my lower braces, and seems convinced that I should be able to wear it after the SARPE. I'm not comfortable with this at all! I'm going to have stitches everywhere, plus a molar extraction on the bottom. Plus I'm not at all comfortable with an appliance that relies on my upper arch/palate for support, when my palate is going to be fractured! That is just messed up I think!

I talked with my ortho Thursday about us having to maybe get creative to deal with this, as I do not want to use a CPAP machine for 3 or 4 months just so I can breathe at night. I suggested that perhaps we try and develop something similar to headgear that only attaches to my lower teeth. That way it would pull my jaw forward at night, and it would be anchored in that position with the neck strap, completely independent of my upper palate. I get the impression he is looking for the easy way out and doesn't really want to bother with it. SO....I'm going to show my OS my appliance and see what he says. If he says "NO WAY, that is just not going to work" then I'm going to force the issue with my ortho and make him come up with something different before the surgery on Friday!

I have to be able to sleep in order to heal, and I sorta resent the fact that my ortho is not taking my sleep apnea seriously. He said something the other day like "oh I didn't realize it was so serious" Duh....I wake 25-30 times and hour without my appliance, and I'm going through all of this ortho, SARPE, and Jaw surgery because its no big deal! HELLO! GET A FREAKIN CLUE! Anyway...I will post what we come up with. I know this type of thing is relatively new and perhaps it will help someone to see what we did to handle it.