Tips for SARME/SARPE Victims

Just thought I’d re-visit the SARME surgery again to write a few pointers about what to expect with the surgery, and importantly how to cope with the expander in your mouth.

First thing is this- the expander takes a while to get used to. Some people get their expander put in a week or even a few weeks before the actual surgery, however I got mine in the day before. Perhaps you could argue that having it for a while before the surgery helps you get used to it, but it’s better to have your diet messed up because of the surgery and not for a few weeks prior because of the expander, right? So I would say either way it doesn’t matter, but maybe you’ve lucked out by having it in for only a matter of hours before your surgery.

Anyway once I got the expander I was straight in to claim my bed at the hospital (why I couldn’t just go in on the morning of the surgery I don’t know) so I had a sandwich with me and tried to eat it right after the expander fitting. And I just couldn’t. It felt like I couldn’t chew, my tongue didn’t know where to go or what to do with this big hunk of plastic blocking its natural movement. So I thought great, I’m going to be starving all day and have to get soup or something at the hospital (I loathe soup- which incidentally doesn’t bode well for when I will be having the bimax surgery and I’ll be eating only food with a soup-type consistency). So, eating just feels so wrong and abnormal at first; this is because your tongue needs to get used to its new restricted area of movement.

Eating With the Expander After Surgery:
Always listen to what your surgeon tells you over anything else. If you aren’t allowed to chew, then don’t. That being said, my surgeon told me I could eat whatever so long as I felt I could. I didn’t push it, but after say day 2 I found I could eat pretty normally and didn’t just need soft foods. I wasn’t really in pain and my jaw felt stable, so it really wasn’t an issue. And if this is the case for you I don’t see why you can’t give eating your normal foods a go as soon as you can. Especially for those of us who are having second surgeries- let’s keep some of the liquid diet fun for that and not waste it on SARME :P

Keeping a Clean Mouth:
Food getting stuck in the expander was such a pain. Here are some basic ideas to help. It’s not always a nice picture, but if food gets stuck you need to un-stick it! :

• Swill your mouth with water at the end of everything you eat and during a meal if you feel a build-up of clog coming up. Swill fairly rapidly to blast the food out.
• Use a thicker type of interdental brush to push it through the gap between your palate and the expander to push out any clogs and to reach some of the trickier areas around the molars or other teeth
• Get a syringe or something along those lines (I’ve heard of waterpiks, however I don’t own one so perhaps this is similar), fill it with some water and have a squirt around. Then fill it with mouthwash and repeat to really keep your mouth fresh. My ortho gave me mine, so perhaps ask yours
• If you really hate getting things stuck in the expander keep clear of flaky fish or tinned fish like tuna, and things like beans. They are real buggers to get out because one can get lodged somewhere without you noticing and it gets wedged in so you can’t poke it out.

Talking with the Expander:
Sadly talking with an expander in is never 100%. Talking will certainly improve after a while as to what it was like when you first got it fitted, however I think you will find some words or sounds very difficult to properly enunciate. I had trouble with the k, q, and s sounds. You might come across other problems. You’ll get used to it after a while, but talking won’t be 100% normal until you have the expander removed.

Bridging the Gap:
Aah, the gap, it’s quite awesome really. Not really much you can do about it except embrace it. If people know what you’ve had done they won’t much care about your gap, and won’t really pay too much attention to it.
Things to do with your gap:

• Pretend to be Cletus from The Simpsons
• Use it to hold a straw when you have a drink
• Make a fake tooth out of dental wax and pretend to knock out your tooth to scare someone and/or pretend they have knocked out your tooth and get them to give you a gift as an apology
• Drop said fake tooth into a family members drink or dinner, wait for them to discover it and then say ‘Oh that’s where my tooth is, I thought I’d swallowed it when it came out. Sorry’

Well not really! You just need to live with it until it closes. Not much else!