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Talking and teaching

1 May

Thursday 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.

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Jury Duty

22 Apr

I was summoned for jury duty today, but it turned out that they didn’t need any jurors today, so I didn’t even have to show up. I had considered getting a medical excuse, but I seeing as I taught last week, it didn’t seem like I really needed to be excused. Even though I have plenty else to do, I almost wanted to go to see how they’d react to me showing up with a wired jaw. Many people have told me that lawyers don’t like to have mathematicians on juries, so I didn’t think there was a real chance of impanelment.

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The return of somewhat normal conversation

21 Apr

My speech has improved to the point where I can sometimes carry on a one-on-one conversation without feeling a need to explain my injury to the other person. If I need to speak loudly for whatever reason, it’s still pretty obvious that something isn’t quite right, but I can now speak at a more-or-less normal volume without feeling overly self conscious. This allowed me to finally pick up the pay check that’s been waiting for me since the beginning of the month and drop the course I’ve been planning to drop since the injury.

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Teaching through the wires

16 Apr

Today was a big day for me. For the first time since my accident, I taught my three sections. I knew that my speech wouldn’t be perfectly normal, and so it still might be hard for students to hear me if the room were full of chatty students. I also knew that it might be hard for students whose first language wasn’t English. To resolve these issues, I prepared detailed notes for the lesson and told the students that they could take them and leave if they wanted to. I expected that since most of my students were only taking the course to get into business or medical school, most of them would exercise this option. This would have the dual effect of giving the students another way of getting my lesson, and keeping the background noise in the classroom at a reasonable level. My expectation proved correct, as I had only six students among the three sections stay the whole time. Many of those who left didn’t even bother to take the notes.

I’m always a little tired after teaching three sections in one day, and today is no exception. Other than that, though, I feel great.  Less than a week ago, I struggled to get even just a word or two out of my mouth, and I was starting to lose hope that I’d be able to teach today. To have been able to get up and teach for four hours under these circumstances is a huge psychological victory that low attendance isn’t going to take away from me.

In all fairness, I owe some credit for today’s success to Vega. I teach two consecutive sections with only 10 minutes in between, which means that I have to go about three hours without eating. On a liquid diet, that would ordinarily be very difficult for me, but after my Vega breakfast, it was not so bad.

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A drug-free me

11 Apr

Yesterday, I struggled mightily to stay awake in my classes. At first I thought this was just because I stayed up late Thursday night, but then I began to wonder if Vicodin, which I had been taking twice daily, might have been playing some role. When I was in the office, I thought that the only side effect on the label was dizziness, but it occurred to me that it might actually have been drowsiness, and I had misremembered or misread.

When I got home, I checked the label of my container of Vicodin, and sure enough, it warned that the drug may cause drowsiness. I wasn’t experiencing much pain, so I decided I’d try to stop taking it.

I haven’t taken Vicodin since yesterday morning, and so far everything is going well. I don’t feel tired, but that may well be because I slept better last night. The most noticeable difference when I woke up this morning, though, was that I was able to talk reasonably well. My speech is still far from normal, I think that most people would find me comprehensible. I do struggle with certain sounds. For example, I can’t pronounce the “th” sound, so I have to use the “d” sound as young children sometimes do.

For the first time, I feel genuinely hopeful that I’ll be able to teach my classes next week.

In all fairness, I don’t know if my ability to talk has anything to do with my newly drug-free status. It may well be that it’s just a consequence of my mouth being a little bit less swollen. However, I do think it’s very much plausible that a narcotic like Vicodin would make it harder to exercise the relatively precise control required to speak clearly.

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Stitch removal

10 Apr

After my morning classes, I went to University Health Services to get the stitches removed from my lip and my chin. After waiting in the lobby for a short while, I was seen by the triage nurse, who I’ve learned is responsible for prioritizing patients based on the severity of their conditions. The triage nurse today was actually the same nurse who had bandaged my wounds on Monday, so she was somewhat familiar with my story. On Monday, though, I had been able to talk reasonably well, but today it’s very hard for me to convey information to other people, so I was relieved at not having to repeat my whole story.

I was kind of annoyed when the triage nurse asked how I was going to get enough food with my mouth wired shut and then added “You’re already such a little guy.”  I’m about 6′ 1″ tall, and I weighed 155 pounds when I stepped on a scale during spring break. I certainly don’t consider myself to be big, but this was the first time in a long time that anybody described me to my face as “little.” I could afford to lose ten pounds before I’d be classified as underweight. The remark seemed particularly inappropriate coming from somebody who was supposed to be giving me a medical evaluation. I mean, if I had stepped on a scale, then it might be appropriate to bring up my weight, but I think it’s reasonable for me to expect the nurse not to make uninformed comments on health-related issues. I know she meant well, but it still seems inappropriate to me.

After the triage nurse, I was seen by a doctor and a nurse. I was amused that the doctor who looked at me asked if my bicycle was damaged. I did my best to tell him that it wasn’t even scratched, although I haven’t cared enough to look at it. The nurse took out the stitches. She had a fair amount of trouble with this because the thread on my chin was the same color as my facial hair, which I’ve been unable to shave since the accident.

I went into UHS hoping to ask somebody whether I should be concerned about the pain I’ve been experiencing in my left ear. I think it’s probably just swelling around the site of the fracture, but I wanted to check. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to communicate this question to anybody. Looking back on the visit, it seems like somebody should have recognized the obvious difficulty I was having in communicating and offered me a pen and paper to write down my answers. On the other hand, perhaps I should have brought my own pen and paper.

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Teaching (sort of)

9 Apr

Thursday is the day that I’m supposed to teach three sections of calculus. I anticipated not being able to teach this week and arranged for people to fill in for me. However, because I had an exam to pass back today, and the people filling in for me weren’t there for the grading, I went along to return the exams and try to answer questions people had about the way they were graded. I wasn’t really able to answer questions out loud, but I was able to write things down when issues came up.

On an unrelated note, one of the friends who filled in for me raised the question of whether I could do math while on Vicodin. It hadn’t really occurred to me that the medication might cause a problem, but it is a narcotic, so it’s possible. I really haven’t gotten any math done since the accident, and it’s possible that the medication has some role in this. I’m only taking the Vicodin twice a day, but it’s something to consider.

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The newly wired life

8 Apr

My mouth has started to feel sore, but I’m not too worried because my mouth used to feel this way all the time when I had orthodontic braces and went in to have them adjusted. My tongue is adjusting to having wires on the bottom of my mouth. I don’t really understand how this is possible, but I haven’t been able to find any wires on the top of my mouth.

The oral surgeon called this evening to check in with me, which was nice. He was able to understand me, which I found impressive (he said he had plenty of practice). He repeated some things which he had apparently told me earlier when I wasn’t alert enough to remember them. He told me that the procedure went well and that he was able to get the bone exactly where he wanted it. He also talked to me about the Zip-N-Squeeze bags he gave me for taking in purees and liquids. I actually haven’t tried to use them yet; I’ve just been drinking through a straw.

One consequence of having my jaw wired is that I now have to crush my Vicodin tablets before I take them. This certainly isn’t a difficult task, but I’ve found that whatever I take it with tastes very bad.

There is some good news, which is that I can now tilt my head back without any pain.

Surgery

8 Apr

I actually managed to sleep pretty well last night, which these days means five hours without interruption. It may be because I was exhausted from not sleeping well since the accident, or it may be that I started taking Vicodin to ease the pain.

When I awoke, the swelling in my face seemed to have subsided a little bit, but I was skeptical that the improvement was enough so that the surgeon would be able to work on me. Shortly after I had finished changing the dressings on my wounds (a rather laborious process due to the large number of abrasions), my ride arrived, and it was time for me to leave for the surgeon’s office.

When I got into the surgeon’s office, a man whose position I don’t know (but he certainly wasn’t the surgeon) had me confirm that I was on an empty stomach. He then seated me in a chair, put a mask over my face, and put me on laughing gas. I had never been on laughing gas before, and I didn’t find this pleasant in the slightest. This was partly because it gave me a sharp pain in the top of the head. Furthermore, the man tried to make small talk with me while I was on laughing gas, and I found it more painful to talk while on laughing gas than usual. I suspected that this was because I had adapted my jaw motions to minimize pain since the accident, but that the laughing gas didn’t allow me this level of control. I’m not much of a small talker to begin with, so I was thoroughly annoyed with this man, and I considered responding to him with a string of expletives. I thought that I could get away with it because I was under the influence of the laughing gas, but my better judgment prevailed. The man eventually realized that I had stopped answering his questions and saw the pained look on my face, and he shut off the laughing gas. As he did so, the surgeon walked in, and told him to put an IV in my arm.

The next thing I remember, I had woken up with my mouth wired shut and the surgeon was telling me that he hadn’t quite been able to get my bone to stay in place without wiring my jaw. He told me he wanted me to come back so he could look at my mouth in a week, and one of the receptionists asked me if 1:15 next Wednesday would work. I knew that I had class at that time, but I didn’t think I’d be able to communicate this fact, so I just agreed to come back then.

My friend drove me home, and I was actually alert and comprehensible enough to direct him to my house by a different route than the one that we had come by. He saw me into my apartment and left me with a container of oatmeal that he didn’t want and that I hoped to be able to drink through a straw if I prepared it right. My friend left, and I went to bed.

Just short of two hours later, I was awoken by my cell phone. It was somebody calling from the oral surgeon’s office, needing to know my father’s date of birth for insurance purposes. I did my best to answer the question, but she became frustrated when she couldn’t understand me at first. I did eventually get the answer across, but it strikes me as terrible judgment to have called in the first place given the circumstances. She should have known that I was recovering from anesthesia, that there was a good chance that I’d be resting, and that my jaw was wired shut. If she really wanted to know the answer, she could have contacted my parents (whose information I had provided for insurance reasons) instead; they would have been happy to answer and easier to understand.

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