Monday was the first day in more than four weeks that my blender has gone unused. It’ll likely be heading back to work tomorrow, since I’m likely to need to shred a tortilla or two.
Archive | May, 2009
Minor updates
4 MayToday was a relatively uneventful day. I can only really think of a few things to comment on:
- I tried dunking some Joe Joe’s sandwich cookies in water, and was pleasantly surprised to find that they softened very quickly. I then proceeded to eat an inordinate number of the cookies.
- My meals were almost exactly the same as yesterday’s. The only change was substituting hummus for refried beans at lunch. In the morning, I worried that I was packing too much food for my lunch in the office, but I ended up finishing it at 10:20AM and needing to have half a serving of Vega to make it through the day.
- The oral surgeon returned my call this morning, leaving a voicemail while I was in class. He told me that some discomfort was normal, but he didn’t answer the question of whether I should ice it. People ignoring half of my questions is a pet peeve of mine, but in this case I was less bothered by it because the discomfort had gone away already.
Sunday food
3 MayI’m very much aware that I’ve been writing a lot more about what I’ve been eating since getting the wires removed. At first, this seemed backwards. I thought that what I ate on the more restrictive liquid diet should have received more attention because it was more abnormal. Having thought about it some more, though, I think there’s a pretty good reason for the way things are. On the liquid diet, I ate pretty much the same thing every day, so there wasn’t a whole lot to say. I’d have several smoothies, a serving of Vega, and a can of soup. Now that I have more options, of course there’s more to write about.
With that said, here’s a summary of today’s meals:
- Breakfast was the usual oatmeal, but today I increased the portion, starting with a cup of dry oats rather than half a cup.
- Lunch was a soy yogurt plus variations on a couple of things I’ve eaten in recent days. One was chinese noodles with miso. I decided to try this as a substitute for ramen after I realized how salty ramen is. The first time I read the label of a package of ramen a few days ago, I was impressed to see that it had less than 200 milligrams of sodium. However, I took another look yesterday, and I realized that I had read the wrong line, confusing the number for potassium with the number for sodium. In fact, a single serving has over 1000 milligrams of sodium, so I decided to do something a little different today. As with the ramen, I added some silken tofu. This time I used firm silken tofu, which has the advantage of more protein. I had no difficulty swallowing it without chewing. The other half of lunch was a can of refried beans with shredded tortilla bits. I realized after the fact that I ate the refried beans much more quickly and comfortably than I did on Thursday.
- Dinner was a bowl of tamarind lentils from last night.
- Dessert was Purely Decadent soy ice cream with Latchkey Lime Pie, from a recipe of Isa Chandra Moskowitz at Post Punk Kitchen. I actually made it last night, but it finished too late for me to try it. I used a graham cracker crust (Arrowhead Mills brand) because I was looking for something crumbly. It was a great pie, although the texture is a bit more gelatinous and less creamy than a typical key lime pie. This was fine with me, but it’s not something I’d serve to an omnivore to prove that vegan food can be normal. Or maybe I just don’t want to share my pie with anybody. I ate two slices and a couple of tiny slivers, altogether adding up to about a sixth of the pie. For what it’s worth, I think the graham cracker crust worked very nicely. It crumbled in my mouth as I had hoped, and the lime filling infused it with a very nice flavor.
- A while after dessert, I remembered that I had four mangoes, which were on sale at Whole Foods last weekend. I decided to try one which seemed ripe. It was good, but perhaps not as ripe as I should have let it get before eating it without chewing. I tried, with varying degrees of success, to crush little pieces of mango between the roof of my mouth and my tongue. It all went down, but I think it would have been better to wait a little longer for the mango to soften. The remaining three mangoes will wait a bit longer.
Incidentally, I think today is the first day in four weeks that I haven’t eaten any smoothies. I actually like smoothies, but enough to be make me want to have as many as I had while wired, so this is something of a milestone.
Rubber bands
3 MayFor the three week period following the removal of my wires, I have to have rubber bands in my mouth to keep my teeth returning to the right position. Now that I’ve been wearing them for a few days, there are a few things that seem to be worth mentioning:
- Unlike the rubber bands that I wore on my orthodontic braces in junior high, these go right at the front of my mouth. They’re probably pretty visible to people when I talk to them, although I’m not really one to be too bothered by that. Most of the people I talk to in the course of a day have some idea of what I’ve been through over the last few weeks, anyway.
- When I first put in new rubber bands, they taste (unsurprisingly) like rubber. In case you’re wondering, I’m familiar with the taste of rubber from licking an eraser in second grade.
- Fortunately, I am allowed to remove the rubber bands to eat. It takes some restraint on my part not to eat all the time as an excuse to leave the rubber bands out.
- For the first day or two, after a meal I’d find that I was having trouble figuring out where my teeth should be resting, and the rubber bands were helpful in straightening things out. By now, my jaw is finding its resting position even before I get the rubber bands back in.
- These rubber bands are very prone to breaking. I had two break in the first section I taught on Thursday and one in the last section. Often, rubber bands will break when I try to put them in for the first time. The oral surgeon only gave me a small envelope of rubber bands, and I’ll be surprised if it lasts until my next appointment (which is Tuesday of next week).
- Yesterday, I noticed the rubber bands making some squeaking sounds when I opened my mouth wide. I wondered if this was a sign that I’m able to open my mouth further than I previously.
- Sometimes when I’m walking around, I’ll notice that I’m clenching my teeth. I don’t know if this is because of the pressure applied by the rubber bands or because I’m used to having my jaw wired shut. I also don’t know why this only happens when I’m walking around.
Saturday food
2 MayI tried a few different foods today. In the afternoon, I had a mixed a shredded tortilla in with some peanut butter and jelly. It tasted pretty good, but it was hard to get the peanut butter to mix. This probably wouldn’t have been a problem had the peanut butter come from the top of the jar, but the last few spoonfuls in a jar are always hard. (If you’re keeping track, I finished that 28 ounce jar seven days after opening it, compared to six days for the last one.)
For dinner, I made the tamarind lentils from Veganomicon again. This time, I used green lentils and allowed them to cook for considerably longer than the instructions. The result of this was that the lentils ended up nice and soft, so that I can swallow them without chewing. I multiplied the recipe by a factor of approximately four, so it should last me a while. I used my largest pot (which is actually only 5.5 quarts), and the quadrupled recipe very nearly filled this. I’ll have to put the pot in the refrigerator (when it finally cools) because I don’t have any other container big enough.
I also made a dessert today, but I’ll write about it tomorrow after I’ve tried it.
Not a bill
2 MayNeglected (but not forgotten) in the excitement over opening my mouth for the first time in three weeks was the arrival on Wednesday of a statement for my treatment in the emergency room. It stated in big letters that it was not a bill, and that the hospital was in the process of billing my insurance company. Unfortunately, it appears that (in spite of the EMT in the ambulance telling me that he had submitted information for both insurances) they have only my student insurance information, which is secondary to the plan I have through my father’s job. I’ll have to get that corrected, and it will almost surely be more trouble than it needs to be.
Fortunately, the charges are less than I thought they might be (although still a substantial sum of money for a stay of less than four hours). I’m surprised, though, by a charge of $157.10 for “Pharmacy”. The only things I can think of that this might have covered are the hospital robe, the stuff they used to clean my abrasions, the needle and thread to stitch my wounds, the tube of bacitracin ointment they gave me, and the shirt I left the hospital in. They didn’t even bandage my wounds, so there would have been no charge for bandages. I’ve listed a lot of possibilities, obviously, but it’s still hard for me to believe it would add up to that much, and some of it I would have expected to be included under “Emergency treatment” instead. Luckily, my insurance should cover almost all of the charges (once I get the correct information to the hospital), but I have to feel bad for the uninsured patient who has to pay the whole bill.
What a difference a trip to a grocery store (or three) makes!
1 MayAs I slurped my oatmeal breakfast this morning, I struggled to think of anything to pack for lunch. I knew that I could fall back on the supply of Vega in my office if I needed to, but I wanted to celebrate my ability to open my mouth with something a little more conventional. Having run out of soy yogurt and frozen fruit, I didn’t think I could make a smoothie, so I settled for a can of soup, pureed in the blender.
I ended up leaving the office shortly after lunch and returning to my apartment before heading out to do some grocery shopping. On my first trip, I went to Berkeley Bowl and Whole Foods Market. I go to Whole Foods frequently, but trips to Berkeley Bowl are a rarity for me. I’d always found it to be expensive for some of my staples, things like non-dairy milks and tofu. This time around, I did find a few things on my list that were cheaper than at Whole Foods, such as silken tofu, but I doubt I’ll be returning regularly.
I returned home from my first shopping trip to eat my first dinner, which started out consisting of a package of ramen with half a block of silken tofu. For all of the jokes about students living off of ramen because it’s all they can afford, I actually really like the stuff. Somehow, though, this was the first time I’d had it since I started graduate school, and it may even have been the first time since I started college. Fortunately, I bought a few more packages, so I’ll have some to feed later in the week, too. The silken tofu was a nice addition, too. I had been somewhat concerned that it wasn’t going to be soft enough for me to eat without chewing, but it really was a perfect food for me, given all of my dietary restrictions. In a sheer display of lack of willpower, after finishing the ramen, I cut up the remainder of the block of tofu and slurped it up with a little bit of teriyaki sauce.
I then embarked on my second shopping trip, the destination of which was Trader Joe’s. There, I acquired some hummus and whole wheat tortillas, which became the basis for my second dinner. To make my second dinner, I started out by just cutting and tearing a tortilla into small pieces and then mixing those pieces with some hummus. Some of the pieces of tortilla were large enough to make it feel a little bit weird as it went down, and I realized as I finished that I could have used my blender to break up the tortilla. Of course, I couldn’t wait for tomorrow to try this, so I took out another tortilla, tore it into large pieces, and then shredded these pieces with the blender. After removing the shredded tortilla from the blender, I mixed it into several tablespoons of hummus. The second tortilla went down much more easily. In all, I probably used about half a pound of hummus tonight, so I’ll probably end up making my own hummus some time soon in order to keep the cost and the number of trips to Trader Joe’s under control.
My dessert today was the same as the last two nights: brownies and Purely Decadent soy ice cream. I actually finished the brownies today. A few people did take one at the office on Wednesday, so I didn’t eat the whole recipe myself, but I’m sure that I came pretty close.
I very much enjoyed my two dinners tonight. While they admittedly weren’t exactly what I would be eating if not for my accident, they compared favorably to the smoothie and soup diet that kept me going for three weeks. I’ll probably get tired of this diet soon enough, but for now, I like it.
Talking and teaching
1 MayThursday is the day I stand up in front of undergraduates for four hours and talk about calculus, so it presented a big test for my newly mobile jaw. For the most part, things went reasonably well, but there were times when things had me worrying.
In my first section, I found that talking occasionally brought pain to the left side of my jaw. I didn’t think too much of it, but it was definitely a reminder that there’s still plenty that could go wrong with this injury, and a smooth recovery isn’t guaranteed. Toward the end of the section, two of the three rubber bands in my mouth snapped. Ideally, I would have replaced them right away, but I chose not to interrupt my teaching and waited until I had a break to replace them.
My break, unfortunately, was only ten minutes long, and replacing the rubber bands took close to half of this time. While it wasn’t particularly difficult, the new rubber bands kept breaking as I tried to put them in. My second section, fortunately, went relatively smoothly, and without any broken rubber bands.
The biggest scare of the day came in my third, and final section. I started off badly with this section, having discovered on my way to the classroom that I had lost my lesson plan. Fortunately, I had already been through it twice in the day, so this didn’t present too much of a problem, and I’m not sure if any students even noticed. However, with about fifteen minutes left, I started to feel discomfort in the left side of my jaw near the site of the fracture. I noticed that the discomfort increased when I turned my head. This all seemed eerily similar to the way things felt in the three days between my accident and the surgery, and I wondered if my bone had broken again and shifted out of place again. A couple of minutes later, a rubber band snapped. I finished the lesson, trying to move my jaw a little bit less than before, and by the time I was done, the discomfort had subsided somewhat. I quickly tried to find a men’s room to replace the rubber band, but was unable to find one in the unfamiliar and infamously maze-like Dwinelle Hall. I ended up replacing it in the hallway using the back of my iPod as a mirror, my fingers still covered with chalk and visible to anybody who walked by.
As for the pain in my jaw, I managed to convince myself that I hadn’t broken my jaw again by tilting my head back, and observing that this didn’t cause the sharp pain that it gave me before the surgery. My guess is that there’s just a little bit of swelling resulting from the increased activity in the area, but I’ll probably call the oral surgeon tomorrow just to be safe.
Shock and Jaw 