My experience with MLD
Trigger warning: The following section has some pretty gnarly descriptions of medical procedures. If you’re squeamish, it might be best to skip past it.
One of the things that drew me to Manual Lymphatic Drainage was the fact that I underwent jaw replacement surgery two years ago as a 38 year old. woman.
Jaw replacement surgery means that you knowingly allow a surgeon to take an electric buzz saw to your face to separate the (in my case) disintegrating jaw joint from the lower mandible (what we generally picture in our minds as the “jaw).
He then takes steel pieces that fancy scientist has made to fit to my exact proportions and attached them to the lower jaw with screws. In addition to this, the surgeon also performed a LeForte procedure (where the surgeon essentially splits my palette as if it’s a pizza in order to make it the size it needs to be), septoplasty (straighten my nasal septum), and genioplasty (cut off my chin bone, added cadaver bone to/around my face to “build up” my chin so that both the physics and aesthetics were good).
If that sounds like a lot it’s because it was. As I write this post I am two years post-surgery and I still deal with the after effects. Not huge things, but stuff that I am super cognizant of.
The first year, there was an uncomfortably large chance that I had unknowingly drooled on myself because I simply didn’t have feeling in the areas around my mouth. It wasn’t a good look.
I share this because I know what it's like to go to sleep with one face and wake up with another. I know the physical, mental, and emotional highs and lows that surround the healing process. And I know what it's like to be terrified to touch one's own body, with anything resembling confidence or certainty that I wasn’t going to mess something up.
My main regret around my own post-plastic surgery procedure (and yes, I consider it “plastic surgery” even though my initial issue was caused by osteoarthritis), is that I hadn’t known about post-surgery treatment options before my surgery.
Had I known about it, I would have been able to get on the schedule of my MLD practitioner weeks in advance. As it was, I didn’t reach out to her until after my post-surgery swelling had been around for month, so the treatment that I was able to receive was delayed by her already booked schedule.
By the time I was able to get treatment, a “new normal” had made its way into my face: a new bone structure yes, but also features and lines that felt heavier due to the swelling that had essentially camped out around the extensive surgery sutures, stitches and healing tissue for longer than it needed to be useful.
