For those struggling with TMJ or a heavy overbite/sunken jaw, jaw surgery can be one of the best choices you’ll ever make. Jaw surgery can correct snoring, TMJ pain, and the quality of your smile. However, jaw surgery is a very intensive procedure, and most people take nearly a year to fully recover. Here is what you can expect during jaw surgery recovery.
Immediately Following Surgery
For about a ten day period, the only thing a recovering patient can eat is liquid food. After ten days, they can begin to includes soft foods that don’t need to be chewed, and after 20 days, patients can begin to chew again. There is a lot of swelling involved in jaw surgery, and many patients say it took them a full year before they noticed all the swelling has gone.
Two Months Following Surgery
Two months after surgery, most patients will be able to eat normally again. Some patients experience a tightness in their jaw around this time as they adjust to the new feeling. An exercise which helps patients adjust is to slowly stretch out their jaw on a daily basis. This reduces the tightening of the muscles around the jaw, and eventually reduces swelling. At the two month mark, patients say that their swelling reduced by about 80%, but the rest of the swelling still takes about a year to fully subside.
Benefits of Jaw Surgery
Changes and benefits aside from a considerable aesthetic change that most patients notice, jaw surgery corrects patients snoring, pain, tooth wear caused by misalignment, and much more.
